I think that's the distinction that a lot of people miss (your post included). These are frameworks that work with apple's official dev environment, so if apple

I think that's the distinction that a lot of people miss (your post included). These are frameworks that work with apple's official dev environment, so if apple introduces a new feature, and if oolong or cocos2d or whatever is dragging their feet in incorporating it, a developer could just call directly into the SDK for it, no hoops to jump thru. Whereas if they were using Flash or Unity or something they'd have to wait for the middleware to support it. Not that I approve of apple's stance on "original language" but I understand where they're coming from,