It's true and obvious that Apple slowed down innovating the web since the core of their business is iOS and apps. They should not have an interest in a fast innovating web that gets on par with native apps which is their main lock-in for iOS, just like Microsoft did 15 years ago. They only speed up their rendering engine and JS core but don't try to help on standards improving the web experience.

BUT: I doubt this pointer event thing is a good example for their strategy because it's really just a nice-to-have feature for the Surface and the Note series which is for my taste a too small target to justify a standard.

A good example for Apple reluctance to innovate the web is CSS Flexbox. CSS Flexbox is the best positioning standard I encountered, every vendor supports it, only Apple still prefixes it with -webkit.

Another example is their reluctance to make WKWebview fully workable, since months there is still a bug which prevents WKWebview loading local files, the bug was already fixed in an early beta of iOS 8 but then they put it again in. WKWebKit is way more performant than UIWebview and can produce butter smooth HTML5 apps with Cordova/Phonegap but this one bug makes it hard (people already build local web servers to work around this problem).