This debate is done since long ago: everyone is doing native applications these days. Good luck trying to find any useful Android application that does not have native code.

Read the Android SDK Changelog and tell me they're not clearly trying to make native stuff easier.

It is not surprising that most of the Android team comes from the old PalmOS team. PalmOS 5 (aka Garnet) used Motorola 68k binary code as their "VM code". Just count the number of apps released after 5.0 than do not have or use any native code at all...

Seems they didn't learn after all, and repeated the same mistake, but are slowly correcting themselves...