I guess it's about expectations. As a web app, people might expect a slight delay when tapping. But a native app should be responding instantly to taps (like the rest of iOS does), and this doesn't cut it.

When it launched, the mobile Gmail app was great. Unfortunately they decided to break scrolling by poorly reimplementing it in JS and it's all downhill since then.

Yesterday there was a google team blog post about the new gmail interface. I went there (the blog) in my iPad and there were no scrollbars and accelerated flick to scroll didn't work at all. It definitely felt weird to have no accelerated scroll.

What are you saying? web apps are better or native apps?

That people accept (bad) things from web applications they will never accept from a native application, I'm guessing.

This would imply native applications generally being better than web applications, since the acceptability threshold is higher.

That native apps are better.

People have lower expectations from web apps, e.g. it wasn't too long ago that GMail getting drag-and-drop attachment support was a big deal.