This isn't a surprise at all. You need total control over layout and UI elements. SVG has a lot of advantages over canvas, specifically it can take advantage of

This isn't a surprise at all. You need total control over layout and UI elements. SVG has a lot of advantages over canvas, specifically it can take advantage of hardware acceleration and doesn't have the text layout quirks that canvas does. If you think about what it would take to build a User Interface toolkit you would use in a desktop application in HTML5 you can see lots of problems. There is simply too much abstraction in HTML5 to do what Apple may have wanted to do. Cross-browser quirks are unavoidable and performance can be very difficult to get right especially with interactions in the DOM. Even if you can get performance right there may be issues with producing the exact layout in each browser or the designers intention in the first place.