I've been waiting for Apple to open up their NFC hardware too. I'm working on a closed loop payment app (https://www.loopz.io) that uses NFC and Apple's lockdown has been frustrating since the first question I get when showing the app is; does it work on iOS? This is the first step in them allowing access to the NFC chip hopefully. The chip in iPhone 6 and 7 supports writing to tags (which I need for my app) but it's not exposed through the API's at the moment. Android has allowed this since Gingerbread.

looking at the documentation, I'm not able to see if the API allows for even read/write of direct links. Is that the case?

There is no support for writing direct links as you say, but if the data is a standard NDEF URI then I believe the NFCReaderSession will return the NDEFMessage objects (code example https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44415442/nfc-tags-not-de...)