I have to wonder how this would have turned out if Apple wasn't already taking a lot of heat for the new developer agreement. Perhaps they are tempering their stance.
Perhaps they tried it and realized that it's not something that most users would want, and thus it stands little chance of hurting the platform.
Opera Mini is good for little more than simple content consumption on an extremely low-bandwidth diet (e.g. EDGE). For any sort of interactive, dynamic, or AJAX-y site or web app, it just doesn't cut it.
One thing it does really well is make everything one column of text- I think it's Mobile view in Settings. That is really nice for reading stuff. I'd still be using it if the Android Browser didn't already do the same thing.
Opera Mini is good for little more than simple content consumption on an extremely low-bandwidth diet (e.g. EDGE). For any sort of interactive, dynamic, or AJAX-y site or web app, it just doesn't cut it.
Case in point: http://twitpic.com/1f79bp