Besides that, why take away the ability to create webbased apps? Could we not have the option if I know I don't care about any of the fancy stuff. There are so many apps out there these days which are just shells of an app with a WebView inside. It feels a bit ridiculous to have to buy Apple hardware to make a shell and then use our preferred dev environment to develop the site/internals of the app.
There were plenty of discussions about HTML5 vs native mobile apps. Big companies like Google and Facebook extolled HTML5, partly because they needed leverage against Apple's stronghold over the dominate ecosystem. So yes, the decision was a business one to begin with.
Then when reality didn't fit their agenda they've all since switched positions in 2012. Facebook rebuilding their iOS app with Obj-C, for example, to be as fast as possible. So then the decision ultimately became a technical one.
Maybe it'll flip flopped around soon. We did go through a period in the 90's when CD drives came out and everyone rushed in to deliver as much multimedia content on CDs as possible before that industry died and gave way to the ubiquity of the Internet.
In the future, smart phones are the CDs.
That's what iOS 1.0 did. There were no native apps, just web apps that had cute icons that launched a specific URL.
People tried very hard to make that work. It didn't. The breadth and depth of mobile applications we see today only occurred once Apple provided a native SDK.
The reasons for this are simply technical ones.