I have to say that I am surprised to see the reticence toward Safari support. I work at a large R1 and do a lot of interdisciplinary work, and the top two browsers are far and away Safari and Chrome. Anecdotal evidence, I know, but even at conferences and such seeing someone running Firefox is rare. It seems to me that supporting Safari and Chrome would capture most of the academic market. Perhaps a desktop application will solve all of these issues.
Two further comments:
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Running a full version of a reference manager on iOS is quickly becoming a must have–the first company to successfully do that will have a distinct advantage. What is out there currently is focused on reading articles, but more and more people are using their iPads for so much more. The ability to handle (i.e. read, import, manage, and cite) ebooks, websites, pdfs, and to a lesser extent audio/video material on iOS would be huge.
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Word integration is a serious sticking point. I really do think that Paperpile is the best when it comes to gathering research and organizing it. When it comes to citing, though, it works great in Google Docs but doesn’t go beyond that. For a variety of reasons, many will simply not use G-Docs. It is a testament to the strength of Paperpile that I am using G-Docs as much as I do (which isn’t much). Most of the time, I use Paperpile to gather/organize material and then do something else when it comes time to write and cite. That works okay for now, but I can’t see doing that indefinitely.