Oh, come on! That's bordering on apologist drivel. Palm may have given developers some hooks into their system, but Javascript/HTML is hardly a replacement for a real development environment. Beyond all the obvious issues, it's not efficient or fast enough for anything but the most casual of uses. And until someone ports Quake or Monkeyball over to the Pre using HTML and Javascript, I'll remain unconvinced.
Javascript's speed is a function of the browser. Witness the significant increases in speeds in the latest version of Safari(WebKIT) and every other browser that is under significant development for a large number of users.
One upside for javascript is that the run time environments for it has been so bad that it is relatively easy to get improvements by just leveraging sensible dynamic language implementation strategies.
No language is most appropriate for all jobs, but it is a phreakin phone. Don't have to run every kind of app possible on a phone. Not sure when smartphones primarily had to be competitors to Gameboys and PSPs to have a competitive offering. Seems much more likely that Pre would attempt to draw the folks who primarily want a phone+PDA rather than those who want a phone+Gameboy.
There is also an acknowledged development effort for putting mobile Flash on webOS also. (
http://www.precentral.net/webos-gaming-flash-palms-secret-weapon) .
Maybe that will be one of apple's "one more thing" at WWDC for the iPhoneOS .... or maybe it will continue to be remain flashless.
Anyway, I agree completely with the OP. Seems weird to me too that there was such a relentless outcry about the iPhone having web-based development only, and yet, not a peep out of those same folks when Palm does it.
Is it really the same folks or a different set with a similar argument?
One aspect that folks keep overlooking that webOS "web apps" run without the web. Apple's appeal for developers to run their apps remotely over the network in the initial stages was protested in part because if drop out of network connection you loose all your apps.
Google Docs give you a working Word/Excel clone. To poo-poo that you can't get "real applications" out of Ajax apps is a huge stretch. Likewise can't just take top 10 off of App Store and say can't do blah so doomed. Frankly, 3 months from not most of those top 10 won't be there anymore. Similarly that would be like someone taking the top 10 Gameboy games at the time of iPhone introduction and saying it was doomed because there was no equivalents.
And as a programmer and Web developer myself, I have to wonder about the wisdom of retrofitting local storage and device access on to a language not originally designed with local system security in mind. Could be a Pandora's Box that Palm is opening up here.
As much as several of those are read only ( orientation, gps , etc.) hardly any less secure than Ajax web aps are now. Flash apps have access to mic and camera now. Similarly java apps have access to native resources through API calls.
If they were pushing an extended javascript language perhaps. But this seems to be providing function call interfaces to get and some cases push info. The storage could look like regular web store retrieve. file://localhost/foo/bar.txt isn't all that differnt from
http://localhost/foo/bar.txt
Some of the security problems are already there with javascript in browsers.
If folks pushed code fragments through that would be another thing. As long it is just data and the API is purely in Palm's hands where is the breach?
Most of this brouhaha over Pre seems to be people trying to rationalize there purchase of an iPhone over some other alternative.
More for iPhone design then Zune and now Palm. Seems none of them wants to be left behind. 
