Mozilla launches WebAPI

Actually, the phonegap people are participating in Mozilla's WebAPI discussions, and Mozilla is participating in various W3C standards discussions surrounding those APIs (some of those mentioned in the WebAPI wiki page are actually already part of W3C work, some still need to be developed).
Making web apps that use open web standards able to do everything native apps on mobile devices can do nowadays is a relatively young field and there are not a lot of standards there yet - Mozilla and other stakeholders need to work together to create good standards (that follow open web principles as well as privacy etc.) for that, and also make preliminary implementations to see how they fare (that's why B2G/"Boot to Gecko" and WebAPI teams work closely together there at Mozilla).