This was *also* a bridge strategy play, FWIW. Smartphones seem ubiquitious now, and they felt like a potential future at the time, but were anything but a high-volume proposition at the iOS launch. So having first-rate access to that bridge corpus of content and apps was a massive advantage in de-risking the early iPhone which, again, was a luxury novelty.
/cc @chriscoyier @tomayac
With the App Store and iOS 2.0, as well as Push Notifications in iOS 3.0 ('09), Apple created a capability gap between it's preferred proprietary platform and the open web. That gap persists to this day, and is a large part of why we talk about Safari leadership as a historical novelty despite Apple's overwhelming capacity to produce a world-beating browser.
What keeps them from doing it? Strategic antipithy towards a platform it doesn't own and can't tax.
/cc @chriscoyier @tomayac