I'm with you - a lot of them are, but too many are not. I personally use the NYT and FT news apps in the subway quite a bit.

In terms of pain points, the biggest is Safari. It gets rid of website state pretty quickly. I have tons of disk storage on my phone, why not serialize to disk? It could even be a "frozen" mode that still lets you scroll saved articles. It wouldn't be so useful for web apps, of course.'