No, I haven't developed with Objective-C, so I can't really compare. What I can say is that Corona makes it extremely easy to get something on the screen and start going.
I've also been thinking about Corona for some non-game apps. How is it at handling text in general -- working with fonts, wrapping text, special formatting, etc.?
Thanks for offering to ask questions. Also, I had no idea apps were compiled on their servers... that's an interesting approach.
Using different fonts is easy. You just list the font that you want and the size. As for wrapping, in their code exchange, someone has implemented wrapping functionality.
Text objects are just like anything else in corona, you can rotate and animate them to your hearts content.
Yes they do. It had been a little slow due to the traffic they've received from the bubble ball app going #1, but it seems like they've taken care of whatever the issue was.