Your first point is so valid. Having created a webapp for the iPhone myself there really are few places I can go to put my webapp on a stage that anyone cares about. If someone knows of any I honestly would love to know where they are.
This is the problem though. The app store is like "American Idol". Singers see American Idol etc as a quick route to fame. Then they're "famous" for 30 minutes, then not.
It's far better to build up a real sustainable following yourself based on real merits. The app store is full of gimicky one time apps people will use once to show their friends, then never use again :/
I get about 60~70% of my new users from organic SEO. (I have not run that calculation in a while -- it may be higher now. It was certainly a lot higher in October.)
Almost every successful startup you've heard of which publishes lots of content has an SEO strategy. Slideshare, Scribd (good golly were they aggressive with it -- good thing they got big before they got smacked), Yelp, etc etc.
Its hard to give examples of successful SEO, because you don't want extra competition in your niche. As a result, all we (SEOs) can offer for free is general advice on how to do it yourself.
That said, I've been wanting to write a free guide to SEO aimed at HN-like companies, because I think its important. However, the response from HackerNews to anything involving SEO is so harsh, I've felt it would be a waste of my time. If that's not the case, please let me know.
Its my understanding that Apple would like require an "explicit" rating, since you could change your web page to have pictures of an "inappropriate" nature.
Same restrictions apply: the web view has a limited set of functionality and there is no way to communicate between the native cocoa part of the app and the javascript part running in the web view.
