Exactly. If there's nothing your app does except act as a "nicer" front end to your website, it doesn't deserve to be an app.
Take the Newegg app, for instance. It is literally a mobile site served up in PhoneGap. They could just make that their default stylesheet for mobile web and it would both perform better and be a better experience for their users, who now don't have to download yet another app to use a website they'll visit once or twice a year.
Done right offline reading is a valuable feature for news apps (proper Newspapers), particularly for traveling (flying) or when roaming so that you can refresh on wifi and use without roaming charges.
The apps also serve as a bookmark. Although I use bookmarks in my desktop browsers, I usually just type wherever I want to go. That isn't really feasible on mobile browsers and I don't even bother with mobile bookmarks.
For the Newegg app they do have barcode scanning built in (Android version) which isn't possible as a website.
Take the Newegg app, for instance. It is literally a mobile site served up in PhoneGap. They could just make that their default stylesheet for mobile web and it would both perform better and be a better experience for their users, who now don't have to download yet another app to use a website they'll visit once or twice a year.