How is "never the case" derived from this email? This email was sent after iPhone shipped and doesn't say anything about shipping Cocoa Touch as a goal before this point.
This claim is directly contradicted by this e-mail exchange from October 2007, the very e-mail exchange in which they decided to move forward with a native app SDK. The iPhone was announced in January 2007, a full 9 months earlier, and was in development for a few years before that.
If they "always planned" the App Store, why would Bertrand, one of Steve's direct reports, be writing as if this were a brand new idea?
One of the original iPhone's "killer features" was a full, desktop-equivalent web browser in the days of the "mobile web" and WAP. They invested significant engineering effort into making it performant, adding UI affordances for zooming and panning around pages that couldn't fit on a 3.5" screen, and so on. It's completely believable they thought this solution was enough for third-party apps.
You have to keep in mind that with iPhone they built a truly revolutionary device not even remotely like anything that had ever been built. And then the jailbreak community took it and ran with it and immediately demonstrated the next level of what was possible.
It’s not that strange it didn’t all work out the way they had planned. If, prior to the original demo, you had asked just about anyone how long it would take to build something like the iPhone they would have probably said it was a decade away.
There is a reason the Android project had to throw their whole UI out of the window and start over. And if took years before they were anywhere near the iPhone experience.
Ah yeah, the deluded (you) thinking everybody else are the insane ones.
If you look back at that time period, the "Fine!" surely came about because iPhone jailbreakers had extracted the API from the apps and were making their own Cocoa Touch apps and sideloading it onto the iPhone. "Let's enable" sounds like they decided to open it up to the public, if your theory about stop-gaps is correct I would've expected the wording to be "Fine, let's enable CT apps early.". The rest of the email also talks about the jail which is the app store, which seems to be a rough concept of "What we need to make this happen", rather than something that they've been preparing in the background.
It looks more like you're having a stockholm syndrome with your own "knowledge".
Cocoa Touch apps wasn't a new idea, since that's what all of the Apple-developed native iPhone apps used. What's new to this email is getting approval for enabling 3rd parties to write & release them without jailbreaking your phone.
