I'm with you. I don't do iOS development at all, but I will literally sit there and go through the entire code of every iOS control submission to Hacker News just to see how they accomplish what they do. I cannot believe how much code it takes to do something I feel you can accomplish easily in javascript.
Kudos to all the iOS developers out there. I don't know how you guys manage to do it, but I'm sure glad you do and are willing to share your code with the rest of us.
I've been on the both sides of the fence: writing native iOS apps and trying to do mobile web iOS apps. From the bottom of my heart: writing native apps is far more enjoyable and productive at the moment.
With the browser engine underneath, you get nice benefits in text layouting, image handling and some inputs, but it requires a lot of work to get good performance, to get touch interaction and scrolling feel natural, to make transition animations to work well. Offline access is also PITA if you have a lot of data - indexedDB crashes left and right if not used carefully. The last 20% of the app takes 800% of the time :) and the result is still not what you wanted.
I haven't encountered many good mobile web apps. HN app by @premii is pretty good (http://hn.premii.com/), and the developer once described here in HN that he didn't use any JS library like jQuery for performance reasons, everything had to be coded manually.
