That's beside the point. It's all web services, just with a native front-end. You might not be able to access it from a web browser (though you can see app info in one), but it's still http all right.

Besides, OP also mentions Apple Maps as an example at "Apple sucking hard on anything web related" and you can't access that from the "web" either.

The web != just the ole HTML "world wide web". We know also have native clients. We still call services with native consumers "web services" after all.

And in fact iTunes is just a glorified browser view (albeit with a custom format now IIRC, used to use plain HTML at some point).