HTML5

So the buzz this week is about HTML5. The features that caught my interests in particular are:
1) <video>
2) <audio>
3) <canvas> maybe?

Video. Awesome (because i don't know flash and am too lazy to learn about it). Its intuitive. just point it to a certain video file in your server and that should be all thats needed.

Audio. Same as above.

Canvas. This one was interesting. The potential of such a tool is too great to imagine.  For one that i can think of is fancy shaped divs. How i think it could be done :
1) Draw a large canvas area
2) Draw the shapes and use javascript to reference them as objects or DOM objects.
3) Allocate the div certain event listeners.

Imagine having a non-flash world map element divided into continents and being able to program those continents for various effects! (thoughts for a project that i am working on)

Other things that came with HTML5 are supposedly newer JS functions and CSS3. I don't know yet but I usually search for a functionality that i need on the internet or on jQuery. So far I've been able to get most of em easily, i don't know if they were JS from HTML5 or not. Or perhaps it referred to the new functions made to handle the canvas elements, which is a pretty huge framework from what i saw while exploring the tutorial. As for CSS3, I've actually been using them since some time back. and i didn't even realize that it was CSS3, lol.

Now for some doubts. From what i have understood so far, there are various ways to program stuff on iOS. Some are Xcode (which i have but am noob at), objective-C (no experience), or HTML5. So, that means within the core, an iOS is able to render HTML5? Will JS/CSS will be in as well?
Does it mean that Safari App actually uses the innate HTML parsing, but simply with the ability to point to other URLs? Really looking forward to some trial runs soon.

Finally, as a close heres some food for thought: Who initiated the development for HTML5?

APPLE (: