For the average developer, using the App Store as a distribution channel is like playing Russian Roulette with your resources. If you don't have considerable marketing money to ensure your app makes it to the top of the iTunes category, your app will simply be buried beneath the horrible user interface of the App Store. It's a little better as far as Android is concerned but not much.
An app store is great for consumers, it sucks for developers. Especially the iOS AppStore where people spend huge amounts of time and money for an app that has a good chance of being rejected for any number of arbitrary reasons. And vendors like Apple go to great lengths to make extra sure your app code is not portable to other platforms, so it's not like you can share significant amounts of code between, say, Android, Windows, and iOS apps.
Enter HTML (5) mobile apps, which work basically the same across all platforms. Sure, you have to make adjustments for different capabilities, but that will even out over the next few years. Basically HTML 5 finally fulfills the promise of Java after all these years. Of course, there are a lot of apps that simply cannot be built with HTML yet, especially games...
App store is a great distribution, not marketing mechanism. You still have to do your own marketing. It's just very easy for people to buy an app by tapping a button. And it's the default. Many people would be suspicious of apps trying to charge them in Safari.
Of course, if you have a non-mobile web app and are offering a mobile companion, web version it's fine, but if you're building a standalone iDevice app that you want to charge for, AppStore is the only viable option.
You're submitting that marketing an html5 app is any easier than an app store app? The app store is orders of magnitude smaller that the web. Talk about being buried.
An app store is great for consumers, it sucks for developers. Especially the iOS AppStore where people spend huge amounts of time and money for an app that has a good chance of being rejected for any number of arbitrary reasons. And vendors like Apple go to great lengths to make extra sure your app code is not portable to other platforms, so it's not like you can share significant amounts of code between, say, Android, Windows, and iOS apps.
Enter HTML (5) mobile apps, which work basically the same across all platforms. Sure, you have to make adjustments for different capabilities, but that will even out over the next few years. Basically HTML 5 finally fulfills the promise of Java after all these years. Of course, there are a lot of apps that simply cannot be built with HTML yet, especially games...