I'm also really curious about the future of Dev Tools and hope to see it applied to other uses. I think there is a range of tools we could be building on top of or around Chromium/DevTools/etc to provide real-time workflows for animations, visual programming, shader authoring, WebAudio editing, and plenty more.

I wrote about it a bit here: http://mattdesl.svbtle.com/motion-graphics

You might also want to check out Thrust and atom-shell as alternatives to node-webkit.