I agree, although I expect that will be a dwindling proportion of the apps people actually use. All but a small handful of the things I used to do with native apps on my laptop I now do with web apps.
I agree to some extent (the interesting and innovative applications will tend to be native, because they will be using the device in ways unanticipated by the browser vendors). There is another angle to native apps that these articles rarely mention and that is the "channel" created by the app store.
For example, many common applications I'm asked to develop for corporate clients can easily be written as HTML5 web apps, and it makes sense to write them this way for cross-platform reason, but all of the clients I've spoken with decide to go the "PhoneGap" route because they want their app to appear in the App Store because this is where there customers are going to be looking for it.
There are plenty of practical reasons to host your web app off a wing of your regular website (bypassing App Store approval being the big one) but so many users have become accustom to getting their apps via the App Store that making your app available in an App Store, even if it's HTML5 wrapped in a native-code package, makes sense (at least for now).
Of course there is also the monitization issue, but I believe there are some solutions to that already?
FWIW, Jobs didn't create the Newton, he killed it. You don't have to look to hard to know this - http://www.pencomputing.com/frames/newton_obituary.html
As long as native apps have access to parts of the platform off-limits to web apps there will be a place for them.