My company is developing cross-platform business apps in Flex and found that the performance is good enough for our purposes. I would imagine an email app would be the same, but if you are trying to do streaming or voice quality, I suspect you might want to write to the hardware layer.
Flex does a pretty good job at supporting native look and feel, but you need to think about/design and structure your app up front (ie. does the gestures in your app design match the feel of those environments). If you don't design for it, it won't happen.
By and large having one code base will reap you large benefits. But if you've not written cross platform applications before (linux/Windows/Unix/Mac, etc), you might find more of a learning curve in your thought process and design process.