I could easily have made it in HTML and JS except it required access to the camera which Mobile Safari doesn't (well didn't, I think maybe it has changed now) allow. So I ended up doing nothing.
Now, that's obviously just an anecdote and the world is at worst one useless app down but I think it makes for a good example as to why arguing against these improvements is silly: it's not in order to make websites more app-like, it's to allow things that would otherwise not exist. Yes, we should all write everything natively if we could, but sometimes that will just mean that things won't be developed at all.