Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also in the native version, you know you're only doing the work required. The jquery one will be doing a lot of extra useless inefficient grunt work to achieve nothing. Making it incredibly slow in comparison.
Premature optimization, and all that. It is trivial to get raw dom nodes out of jQuery, so you can easily use jQuery to begin with and replace any code with the full DOM API calls should it every become a performance issue. This discussion is a bit like how assembly programmers used to defend not moving to a high level language long after the performance benefits were not worth it any more.
That's still going to be a lot of work if the performance issues turn out to be many separate jQuery calls spread all over your code, which is not unlikely.