"Apps are too much like 1990's CD-ROMs and not enough like the Web"
And that's a good thing. App developers have a much wider set of APIs to play with so they can do more while web app developers are stuck with whatever they had around 2005. There's been enormous progress on the back-end of web apps, but the browser side hasn't kept up.
I remember tons of CD-roms which were just HTML, images , swf and java files. The same goes today for many of the apps that are sold on appstores, especially magazines and newspaper apps. The main reason seems to be that publishers can charge for the apps. On the web we don't really have an alternative yet, unless someone comes up with a brilliant, frictionless, secure and elegant web API for micropayments.
And that's a good thing. App developers have a much wider set of APIs to play with so they can do more while web app developers are stuck with whatever they had around 2005. There's been enormous progress on the back-end of web apps, but the browser side hasn't kept up.