This! Neither side has to lose, for the other to win. Both apps and the web will live on and grow as different experiences. People should stop trying to use web technologies for everything. They are killing what made the web great, while at the same time making native apps suck more.
Node.js is pretty "close to the metal", and HTML-as-a-GUI holds great promise for quality, and for cross-platform delivery. Maybe you can't touch the bottom and you can't reach the top, but you can get at the widening middle.
This guy's opinion of course omits the huge problems of walled gardens, dickwad Apple rules, closed platforms, 30% royalty absurdity, and the archaic development process of native apps.
To which the counterpoint is "awesome UX". You'll never get that with web tech.
Sandofsky works at Twitter BTW.
You are probably right about most of the problems, though how much of a problem they really are is related to where you place yourself on a purist-pragmatic continuum.
Sandofsky explicitly mentions development: "Today, for high level work, I am as productive using Objective-C as JavaScript." That's my experience as well.
Cough.