Are there any chips out there that do hardware decoding of VP8? That's a critical path item to get Apple on board - they've learned from Nintendo; battery life is too precious to sacrifice for a mere codec.
VP8 was specifically designed by On2 (in collaboration with ARM) to be decoded easily on low powered ARM chips. They take advantage of various ARM features such as NEON acceleration and are intended to work well even on lowly ARM9, and the codec has built in scalability that lets low-powered devices show the same video file that everyone else gets with less quality and power if needed.
The hardware argument was basically an excuse for Apple to not have to do something they didn't want to when talking about Theora. It's been shown to be irrelevant, or even a benefit to Theora when sending video to people who don't have state of the art laptops. To apply it to VP8 is just ridiculous.