This is completely incorrect. I was at Apple working on iOS during this time period and helped implement and optimize many of those skeuomorphic UIs. Steve was a huge proponent of skeuomorphism.

One example is the iPad Contacts app. Originally it was a simple list of contacts like you'd find in Outlook. This was changed to the "little address book" UI that looked like a leather-bound address book much later in the process because the original UI wasn't "fun" enough.