"Also, from this perspective, MonoTouch and Unity might be in the clear too as they are not cross-platform toolkits reducing themselves to the least common denominator."

Hell yeah! Let's pray. I'm not interested in using MonoTouch because I want to make a cross-platform App that also runs on iPhone/iPad. I'm interested in using MonoTouch because I prefer C# to Objective-C, if only because that's where the bulk of my experience is.