I agree. The current iOS WebView/Safari engine is a badly limited toy. And on top of it, Apple forbids the use of anything else.
But that is the Stalinian shadow of Steve Jobs, here. He wanted to do that with the Mac but it was a bit early. He succeeded closing the hardware and got rid of extension cards, but could not go all the way to a closed OS. With iOS devices, he was able to really get a tight totalitarian system, with no possibility to escape Apple’s rules. Heck, between the hardware with no real standard connectivity, the jailed system, no permission to initiate child processes like shell or helpers, and the sandboxed apps, the computer no longer belongs to the user but to Apple
Android has all the advantages of Windows in that instance : everything goes. Meaning acrobatic programming is possible, which means innovation, ease of installation with a simple APK, but the flipside is the same as Windows : without the police state rules of iOS, hackers, pirates, spyware and all sorts of malware have a field day.
It is amazing to see how today Windows cannot live without a horde of antiviruses each sporting tens of thousands of virus signatures, and still there are regular accounts of zombified PCs. The same seems to happen to Android. On the other side of the fences, Mac OS X still seems quasi immune, and of course ultra paranoid iOS too.
In a way, Apple has the same policy as Rolls Royce : the customer should never, ever lift the hood. See the Genius bar if the jewel starts acting up. Android and Windows, on the other hand, look very much like the car of my youth : take it apart, put it back together, throw a set of tools in the trunk, and if it starts acting up, get your hands dirty, you’ll be alright.
Young people don’t buy R&R. Old and rich people do