Did Apple just jump the shark?

So third party iPhone application development is going to be via web applications. Sigh. Here are some random, ill-informed thoughts provided solely for the purpose of (with any luck) being proven wrong:

Access to iPhone features: Someone (sorry, forget who) has already suggested that special URL handlers (eg. a "dial:1234" link to phone a number) may be made available. This means iPhone-only versions of web applications. I hope the client id string in its version of Safari is easily recognisable.

Look and feel: Okay, so the OS X H.I.G. seems to have gone out the window a while ago (although it looked like Leopard may go some way to remedying this), but on the web there are roughly as many different user interfaces as there are sites. Access to common style sheets and AJAX and server-side libraries could fix this, but so far there's been no mention of them.

Data: The thing with the iPhone is that most of the data you may want to manipulate is on the phone, not on the server. Best case allows apps to automatically access your address book and other data, but means lots of round-tripping (that noise you here are AT&T execs rubbing their hands together in glee, thinking of all that extra data traffic). Worse case is a duplicate, un-syncronised sets of names for each web app. Smart use of .Mac could sort this -- but what's the betting it won't.

Money: As Mac OS Ken observed, how are people going to get paid for this? Sure, the guys at 37 Signals are happy enough, but what about ("proper") Mac developers. It's not just a case of new APIs and different languages, selling web apps is a whole different business model. And I guess you can forget about those neat little free apps which make life on the Mac so much easier: add the cost of hosting and the time and effort to maintain a server on top of the time needed to develop the app and the talented hobbyist is unlikely to bother.

Finding these apps: Nothing along these lines has been announced yet. Some kind of page on apple.com -- quickly linked to with just a single click from Safari on the iPhone -- listing "certified" iPhone web apps would be nice. I've complained in the past about how tricky it can be finding indie Mac apps, but I can only imagine that, without some heavy help from Apple, it's going to be twice as hard for these guys to be found.

This is less than a third-rate solution, but the really unbelievable thing is the way Apple is playing it. Their "sweet" solution is, frankly, terrible, but their decision to sell it like this is worse.