Due to the what? It's not up to the application to decide if its data is useful in other applications or not, that's just ... silly lock-in talk. Quite an annoying attitude, if that's representative.

Luckily I a) can't draw and b) don't have an iPad so I'm not a lost customer.

Well no, I could never say that there isn't tremendous benefit to being able to use multiple tools in a workflow and have control of your data.

Lack of SVG export isn't due to wanting lock in, or even a question of priorities. I spent considerable time working with all the leading vector drawing programs and investigating their performance. The simple fact was that it couldn't work well. Even trivial drawings (20 lines) done with the pencil tool in Sketchology would cause Illustrator to lock up for hours and consume all available memory. Larger drawings would fail to open altogether.

Ultimately I think offering the feature would have been extremely misleading and frustrating for people. I'd rather cut a feature than ship a bad experience.

That sounds like a problem with your app, not theirs. There's no reason why a compliant SVG with only 20 lines shouldn't be easily compatible with any vector drawing program.

Inkscape which uses SVG as it's "internal" format often chokes on seemingly "simple" svg files (which when you look into it have thousands of points on a simple curve).

Often these have been generated by another SVG tool, support another tools idiocy for whatever marginal gain he might make is maybe why he doesn't want to do it.