He's too modest to mention it, but yodasan and colinloretz are two of the 3-member team that created Colorstache, which was one of the five finalists in the Evernote Developer competition.
I'm also a Reno Collective member. I work out of the space writing iOS and Mac apps as an independent developer. Before finding the Collective, I was under the impression that no one was doing any Python, Ruby, or Cocoa (or anything similar) in the area. It was great to find out that there were all these people in Reno quietly working on cool stuff.
The iOS Simulator is specifically refereed to as a simulator NOT an emulator. It simulates the iOS on top of OS X and makes no attempt to be an emulator. It is a decent simulator.
As a dev whose app has been featured once on the front page under "New and Noteworthy", I'd say that Apple's promotion is unquestionably more valuable than any other kind of promotion.
Being reviewed on some site is nice, but it's a negligible rounding error compared to being featured on any list on the App Store. I'm sure any dev who's ever been featured will agree that App Store placement is the biggest single factor in sales.