Firstly, i'm going to agree with you - Yes, ObjC isn't that hard to learn and people intending to distribute apps on the App Store really have no excuse for not

Firstly, i'm going to agree with you - Yes, ObjC isn't that hard to learn and people intending to distribute apps on the App Store really have no excuse for not using it. If you want to use new features (Game Center, Notifications, etc.) there is no better way. Now I have to disagree with you... There is a use case for tools like this, for me anyway - building small one off demo and kiosk type applications. I built a "small" app for a customer the other day which was a menu with 7 or 8 videos linked from it and transitions between the menu and videos., with some logging to say how many times people had viewed each video. Building this natively in iOS meant messing with all sorts of API's, handling multiple different scenarios that I really didn't and shouldn't need to care about and generally consuming far too much of my time and the client's money. Building the same application previously in Flex took me all of about 5 minutes and I suffered no performance issues whatsoever. If Adobe can deliver me a tool to do the same on the iPad/iPhone, both myself and my clients will be a lot happier for it. Don't get me wrong, i'll still need to heavily weigh up what tool to use in more complicated scenarios, but if Adobe can give me something to save time on the smaller jobs (and it works), i'll take it.