Apple made some very short-sighted decisions in the design of the app store that are going to haunt them for years to come. They need developers to write the apps that make their devices real productivity tools but they've cut the legs out from under those businesses before they could grow with their stupid policies.
I don't see this ever happening on mobile or tablet. No one is going to sit there and create a spreadsheet on a smartphone, no matter how big the screen size is. Once you have email, a PDF viewer, and a spreadsheet viewer (already available), what more could you possibly need?
Apple's pricing is right. It's uncomfortable to sit and stare at a tablet or smartphone for hours at a time, nevermind interacting with it (no matter how good swipe is, it will never replace a keyboard+mouse or a game controller).
That "oversupply" of developers, coupled with platform limitations allowing only simple apps, immediately drove down prices to the $1 point, as the best professional shop was effectively competing against someone coding on their weekends, and it wasn't really possible to differentiate their product by building something bigger.
But that's changing. With the bigger screen of the latest iPhones, more RAM in the latest iPads, and better inter-app communication, the platform is starting to be capable of hosting significant applications. All of that, plus the fact that some of these products have been under development for several years now, makes it possible to build a competitive moat that will be difficult for hobby developers to bridge.
So that's what I see as positives going into the future. But app developers are going to need to do what Panic is doing, raising their prices, but they are going to have to do it gradually, maybe 10% a year, so the difference in price with competitors doesn't immediately see them reduced to zero revenue.