Well, Google has a history of preferring HTML above all other interfaces. Only when someone else comes along and offers a better native interface, they jump in.
It's not the transport that's the problem, it's the app.
Meredith L. Patterson has addressed the point of Port 80 (or 443) adequately. For the time being, we're locked into that.
My point is that handing of A/V material to a dedicated AV app is, all else considered, probably optimal. It's the 4th browser replacement mentioned in my "Tabbed Browsing" rant, elsewhere in this thread.
Thank god there's a native iOS/Android client.