It's important because Webkit is already fairly platform independent. (Google does it, Apple does it, and Opera does it, providing builds for Linux and OSX and Win32 quite regularly.) But Firefox is a Siamese twin with Gecko, and Gecko is Siamese twin with EITHER win32 or GTK -- not anything else. And so, in spite of experimental browsers like "Fennec", and "Firefox on Qt", Mozilla can't decide what to do. The Gecko re-architecture and rewrite would be utterly massive.
Meanwhile, Cellphone and Netbook Makers are going elsewhere, to alternatives which are being built with massive amounts of Developer Support-- support provided by Nokia, Google, and now Intel. I've seen a Qt consortium Wiki post which stated, as a matter of *fact*, that there's roughly 500 FULL TIME Developers working on WebKit.
Mozilla is between a rock and a hard place, due to issues from long-ago legacy design choices: GTK , rather than Qt (yes, Qt's license terms were not safe at the time of that choice); and Gecko/XUL as a kind of mish-mash which "no one actually sees".
Today's Firefox code cannot run on a platform with multi-touch UI graphical control, and that's a DEADLY limitation. Gecko will need to be pretty much re-done, from scratch; meanwhile, all those WebKit developers work together, adding new capabilities faster and faster.
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