I think there's certainly a certain bar of quality apple has in terms of the human interface guidelines / look+feel of the app. The fart apps might be crap, but they still look like iPhone apps. I have no desire and i can understand apple's desire to not want apps that have that shitty flash/flex look on the iphone. Now... if the apps look the same, I don't think this matters.
Is it a valid theory to say: this is less about the back end/performance issues and more about the front end/look+feel of apps?
They can enforce this by rejecting ugly apps (I hope they don't). These definitely don't look like iPhone apps, even though they are native: http://nativegui.posterous.com/
Interface guidelines and look and feel matter a lot less when you are making a game doing OpenGL. This is a big market where Flash apps could have competed quite nicely with the Objective-C apps and Apple is blocking that for no actual reason.
Games consume a lot of resources (battery included) anyhow so it's really hard to claim doing it in Objective-C is in any way better.
Is it a valid theory to say: this is less about the back end/performance issues and more about the front end/look+feel of apps?