I wish I would upvote you 100 times. I've been a web developer over 20 years now. This attitude, that the web is unsuitable for applications, was understandable 15 years ago at the birth of web apps, but it doesn't make any sense today.
People need to realize there's never been a platform like the web in terms of portability and accessibility. Comparing the web to GUI toolkits is like saying that comparing Linux desktops to Mac OS X—Linux environments can never have the polish of OS X because Apple controls the entire stack. Similarly, a GUI toolkit can only be as cross-platform as the vendor makes (which is historically pretty terrible for all cross-platform GUI toolkits). The web is not only a standard, but a standard whose implementation is the price of entry for all new devices.
Furthermore, everyone complaining about the web's shortcomings doesn't have the whole picture—in fact the most difficult thing about a standard of this size is that no single individual or organization has the whole picture of what the standard supports. Sure the web was designed for simple documents and evolved into something for which it was never intended, why is this a bad thing? The fact is that you can never replace the web because A) there is no human power great enough to force adoption, it can only happen by serendipity (just like the web) and B) by the time you were done you would have a whole different set of warts that everyone would complain about. People would do well to remember Gall's Law before condemning web-as-app-platform.
People need to realize there's never been a platform like the web in terms of portability and accessibility. Comparing the web to GUI toolkits is like saying that comparing Linux desktops to Mac OS X—Linux environments can never have the polish of OS X because Apple controls the entire stack. Similarly, a GUI toolkit can only be as cross-platform as the vendor makes (which is historically pretty terrible for all cross-platform GUI toolkits). The web is not only a standard, but a standard whose implementation is the price of entry for all new devices.
Furthermore, everyone complaining about the web's shortcomings doesn't have the whole picture—in fact the most difficult thing about a standard of this size is that no single individual or organization has the whole picture of what the standard supports. Sure the web was designed for simple documents and evolved into something for which it was never intended, why is this a bad thing? The fact is that you can never replace the web because A) there is no human power great enough to force adoption, it can only happen by serendipity (just like the web) and B) by the time you were done you would have a whole different set of warts that everyone would complain about. People would do well to remember Gall's Law before condemning web-as-app-platform.