Call it what you want but the web is a way better development environment for UIs than anything else. If the device isn't mobile, speed isn't an issue. The only reason web apps are lackluster now is for speed reasons. I have developed my companies app in HTML5 for the iPad using Phonegap. Speed is good on the iPad 3 but alpha layers had to be turned off because the blending put too much strain on the processor/gfx card. Also transitions are a bit iffy, glitchy, and not as fast as I hoped they could be. However, when I run my app straight from Safari or Chrome on my Macbook, super fast, almost insane speed, and the webkit transitions look damn nice, on par with most things I've seen from Cocoa and Windows UI Animation toolkits. The reason why HTML apps are so slow is because these engines were built originally for static pages, the codebases can't instantly be transformed to be super optimized for dynamic, animating, heavily sized, heavily routined(setTimeout) content but they have been releasing a lot of performance updates so things look optimistic for HTML apps.
