The fact is, I am a webos developer and have been asking for this feature since 2009. It's been in webkit for the longest time and Palm have said they'll add it in, many times and never have. Major let down.
As a fellow webOS developer, I understand your frustration. I'm just as frustrated with them over hybrid apps. I was already deep into development with my hybrid when they pulled the rug out from under all of us and announced that so-called legacy devices would not be receiving the 2.1 upgrade, and since hybrids would only be officially allowed in the app catalog for 2.1 devices, that meant most of my target audience would not be allowed to download the app through the catalog. I had hoped that if the "legacy" devices wouldn't get the upgrade, at least they would now allow the same devices to download hybrids off the catalog, since hybrids work on ALL devices (despite what their PDK documentation might say). Turns out, they won't allow hybrids on all devices, since they all but abandoned users of 1.4.5.
Running native C/C++ code is pretty cutting-edge stuff. It's essentially the Chrome Native Client, on mobile. I've developed a pretty nice app using a native plugin. Unfortunately, most current webOS users won't get to use it because, although the PDK was released last year and, at least for my app, hybrids work perfectly on all webOS devices running at least webOS 1.4.5, Palm (and now HP) has decided to restrict hybrid apps in the app catalog only to webOS 2.1 users, which are very few and far between right now.
Yet you can't even do css background gradients. Real cutting edge.