It was always Jobs' M.O. to trash-talk any important feature(s) they didn't have at any given time. It was and is a valid marketing technique -- I can't really blame him for employing it -- but at some point it stopped fooling me. It required me to assume that Jobs was a dumbass, which regardless of what we might have thought about him was never the case.

From the iPhone being announced to the App Store opening was about 18 months total, quite a pivot if "iPhone as originally announced was never going to allow third-party native apps; it was to be web-apps only forever, and this was not intended to be a temporary position."

As I understand it, the App Store had been under active development for some time, but for the iPad. The iPad was always going to run native third-party applications, but the company was caught off guard by the demand for them on the iPhone.

In retrospect, the apparent speed of their pivot on the App Store policy should have been a very strong indicator that a tablet was in the works. It did look suspicious, but I don't think Jobs was actively lying when he said the iPhone would rely on web apps.