Wait a sec. "No LaTeX on the iPad" conflates "editing a LaTeX document" and "rendering and compiling LaTex to a final document.". Editing LaTeX on the iPad is already perfectly easy and really quite pleasant, especially with a bluetooth keyboard -- I do it most days (currently, Textastic is my preferred platform, supports syntax higlighting, DropBox and MobileMe).
Rendering to DVI or PDF is something else entirely. While other comments here indicate its doable, I have to ask why? I render my documents on another machine (I actually have a script that monitors dropbox and periodically re-pdflatex's if the timestamp changes -- redirecting error messages to a file is trivial if you need to troubleshoot remotely). If you're attempting to do LaTeX with a WYSIAYG interface or (worse) doing the edit-a-line-rerender-repeat cycle, I'd have to say that you're doing it wrong. The assertion that "doing LaTeX" (or, frankly, any platform that supports simple text editing) requires the native presence of the entire LaTex codebase is just misinformed.
Finally, the author of the post apparently started his project without knowing that the original TeX distribution was written using literate programming, what kpathsea was, or that there were other implementations of LaTeX. Perhaps they weren't quite prepared/qualified for the undertaking? This smells like a classic case of "this isn't how I would do it/use the tool, so it must be broken".