My experience with making something very simple in PhoneGap+jQuery Mobile was fine. I was able to do it quickly for iOS. However, it didn't work on my Android phones without making some changes. The project was a very simple app to take pictures and post them to a web site. And at the end of the day it felt "clunky" compared to a true native app.
I don't believe there will ever be easy cross platform development. I think the browser is as close as you will get. By choosing something like PhoneGap I think you are just trading one set of pain points for a different set of pain points.