I'm watching the .NET Show entitled Creating Windows Applications with Visual Studio .NET, and it's very interesting to hear that one of points that the dude is making is that the reason people want web apps is to ease deployment.
To gain easier deployment we've given up the ability to deliver a good user experience. The browser is really not a very good user interface - the back button can seriously break the state of your app for example, and many UI niceties like keyboard shortcuts for controls or context sensitive help are difficult or impossible to implement.
Java tried to be a cross platform GUI but mostly failed at it - I'm still not exactly sure why, but I think it's because the web was "good enough" and didn't incur the overhead of starting up a JVM. Also Java's GUI was cross platform but it wasn't especially good on any platform.
Of course Microsoft's idea of easy deployment doesn't extend beyond Windows as far as I can see - I wouldn't be surprised to see a Macintosh version at some point, but it'll be a long time before they released a Linux runtime.
If Microsoft was to really support Windows Forms with a Mac and Unix runtime, they really would have a shot at replacing the Web GUI with a .NET one.
8:18:06 AM 
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