Adobe's AIR platform is an excellent alternative to phonegap for write once deploy anywhere instead of native apps. It also has excellent hardware acceleration features. It includes a webkit implementation so you can use web standards if you want and the open source apache flex project offers a lot. Flash builder is am excellent coding environment based on eclipse. Besides the large strides in gaming we'll probably see more data driven AIR apps soon as well. As3 is object oriented and very nice, plus the massive tool set from flash pro for animation to illustrator and photoshop are world class.
