That's patently wrong. Until now, you could link to an interpreter, as long as all the code that it running was bundled with the app as downloaded from the App

That's patently wrong. Until now, you could link to an interpreter, as long as all the code that it running was bundled with the app as downloaded from the App Store. No code could be generated by the user or downloaded from the net, though. A lot of games use interpreters. ScummVM is used for the official Broken Sword port, the original SCUMM engine is used in the remake of The Secret of Monkey Island, and a lot of commercial iPhone game frameworks use Python or Lua as a scripting language. That said, I have an implementation of Conway's game of Life on my iPhone, downloaded from the app store. Life is Turing equivalent, and the user can create his own patterns. I guess the app reviewers didn't know about it (or don't care about it since the applications are very limited).