forcing users to upgrade their hardware to stay current

I don't buy this argument. On my iPhone, the native apps perform great. It's the webpages I visit that sometimes cause slowdown. Yes, version of natives apps can come out that require an upgrade. But if an HTML5 application does not run well on current hardware, then a hardware update would be at least desired.

In other words, I think it's an issue for both native and HTML5, which means it can't be used to distinguish the two.