The point that I was trying to get at without breaking any sort of NDA that I may or may not be under was that perhaps there's a way to embed some sort of Apple-sanctioned interpreter in an application...

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Web...

The problem being nobody knows what these rules are. Applications have been accepted that are incompatible with the NDA, and conversely, applications with no NDA incompatibilities have been rejected or pulled for frivolous/unknown/bizarre reasons.

When I look at all these complaints from iPhone developers about the NDA right now, it's not as much about how irrational some parts of it are (really, not letting pragprog publish an iPhone dev book?) but more about how other parts that exist to someone at Apple are not made public to developers and their clients/customers so they know what the actual limitations are. Effectively a black box. Fantastic way to get people to not spend money and time on an application they don't know will be approved or rejected until they're close to finishing up on an initial release.

Therein lies the problem: there are no published rules. You only find out that you've broken them after you've completed development of your app and submitted it to the app store. Say goodbye to several months of your life.