[drpancake]

This is a difficult choice to make because we're at an interesting crossroads in application programming. My gut feeling is that web programming will win in the long-term - there's so much competition between browsers now that the pace of innovation is faster than ever. There's still a long way to go though.

Web programming is great once you surrender to the fact that frameworks are the way to go. At first, yes, it's essentially magic. But once you get experienced and you delve deeper into the framework you can assimilate the (hopefully) insightful design choices made by the developers. If you choose web programming, I would highly recommend the Sencha frameworks: Ext JS 4.0 is out soon and Sencha Touch is looking very promising.

On the other hand: the iOS stack is mature, well thought-out and will teach you good programming practices. It's also where the money is right now - an iPhone/iPad shop I know here in the UK is literally struggling to recruit. I see it as a bubble akin to early web development; a lot of companies jumping on the bandwagon just to have their own 'app'. You've also got to choose whether to learn Android or iOS, which is a whole other discussion!

I'm honestly not sure what to suggest. Personally I'm an experienced web developer learning iOS development and it's been fun so far.