Are you sure? It's better, yes, but it's not a model of UX and on an iPad it seems not much thought was taken into making it a truly universal app. There's a lot of unused space and everything is too large.
The Google+ app with its combo of Path and Flipboard is a much better model to follow. Fast, and it takes advantage of the screen size in both versions.
I wouldn't go this far. Sure, the CoreData backend and table view controller implementation is beautiful and awesome. However, the root level navigation could be improved. The pseudo-popovers for messages, notifications, and friend requests is inconsistent with the rest of iOS, even though it might be consistent with past versions of the application and the versions of Facebook on other platforms.
And it will never be. HTML just sucks for application development.
Why on earth exchange the benefits of using the hardware resources properly for the mess that HTML+CSS+JavaScript is? To mess the customer's experience?
Don't be afraid of touching C, C++ or any other language with native code compilers and at most rewrite the UI part. Or shell out some money for tools like Mono or similar.
Although I am forced to code Web applications at work, I am a firm believer that web should only be used for communication protocols and documents as such.
Like you I write web apps, but I'm old enough/lucky enough to have had some other experiences, and to be quite honest I find even Gtk+ is more pleasant overall than the MV* framework of the month. That we have folks now trying to write AutoCAD or Photoshop in JavaScript just like a loss for our industry.
My first programming languages were Spectrum BASIC and Z80 Assembly shortly thereafter.
Let this be a lesson to us all: when putting user experience as the first priority, the nirvana of writing your UI once in HTML and having it work universally still isn't there.