Using PhoneGap at all seems like half-assing it to me. Just because some people think iPhone and Android apps should look the same doesn't make it so. A native app for each will look and perform much better.
It's easy vs simple. HTML is familiar and therefore perceived as the easy way to build apps. Native apps are invariably simpler after a certain level of necessary complexity.
I'd wager a guess that the "single codebase" app written in PhoneGap get exponentially more complex with each platform due to browser/device/OS quirks, whereas the native implementation means an effectively linear complexity for each additional platform.
