That was their own fault. No ndk when Qt literally shipped on the device. In addition, the QtWebkit and v8 versions were woefully out of date being slower and using more memory than necessary. They also seemingly didn’t optimize their Linux kernel or boot sequence either.
I think some of the problems could be traced to performance and power profile of TI OMAP. It was underclocked AFAIK. Probably due to too much heat or power or both.
It was a widespread delusion. The original iphone didn't support native third party apps until iOS 2. For whatever reason, a bunch of people thought that web-only was the future for mobile.
A shame the first Pre was just unusably slow. Innovator's curse, as usual.