Why did they break from the PoW2 release to do iOS?
They have a dedicated mobile wallet developer. So hes doing his part.
That is a relief, this wouldn't of caused any delays on the PoW2 release then?
No, this wouldn't have.
After the release of PoW2 and Segsig the wallet still needs to be able to read the blockchain as it is now, so all the backwards compatible code is there anyway.
This IOS-release will basically have many of the good things (like UI-improvements and codebasecleanups and bugfixes) that 2.0 will also have but without the 2.0 specific features present/activated. A somewhat clean codebase is modular so this is relatively easy to do. Also one might regard it as a partial sneakpreview.