Why are so many people under the impression that adobe Air can't be used to develop iOS apps for the App Store?

The negative hype around flash after apple categorically rejected them for inclusion in iOS safari has made flash look like a non-peforming platform in the eyes of everybody.

This opinion is not totally untrue though. I tried writing an app using Flex for iOS and quickly realized it doesn't perform as well since it can't leverage multi-threading of iOS (since it's a single threaded runtime)

Because at one point Apple started banning all use of virtual machines and external runtime, including Air and it has gotten a lot of publicity. Since then they have reverted their policy but a lot of people who didn't plan to use Air in the first place continued to hold on to the old info. One of our my apps uses Air so I have been following this very closely.