The problem is that the people who design JS frameworks insist that you have to be able to use JS, HTML, CSS. This leads to bad API, you reuse something that was designed for documents for applications, and no one really knows how to map these different things properly.
GWT could have been a viable route, but it sadly didn't catch on that much.
a) JS, HTML and CSS have been designed to build more than "documents" for over 10 years.
b) Contrary to the idea that these technologies lead to bad API, I see many high impact graphics toolkits moving to a CSS / HTML driven model even when the teams working on these toolkits are not majority web developers. Quick examples: GTK3 and Source 2.
c) There are many Javascript frameworks that do not require deep knowledge of all three of these technologies to produce something. The vast majority of Javascript UI toolkits, for example jQuery UI aim to remove the need for in-depth knowledge of HTML and CSS to produce user interfaces.
d) While I agree with you that there is no one true way to tie together these technologies, I think there are solid abstractions that tie HTML, Javascript and CSS together. I've been very excited about how terse and powerful d3 is for composing any kind of HTML/JS/CSS model.
ExtJS. An old, mature JS framework designed for desktop-style apps on the browser. ExtJS code doesn't look like web code at all - no mentions of DOM and styling and stuff like that. All about widgets and data-binding, like making a desktop app. It's not perfect - being almost as old as JQuery, it has some flaws that would have been avoided in newer frameworks. But it's there and I use it professionally.
The problem, of course, is "why does our webapp look like a desktop application but with non-native widgets?"
Now everybody expects the web to be all designer-y. Even for a line-of-business app. It's on the web, it should look webby.
And it's expensive:
The best, by far, Delphi.
Visual FoxPro was good too.
VB meh
Winforms meh * 2
WPF good, but tooooo hard
After this, is a long fall from the climb.
(I unsure how good is cocoa for desktops, never used it except for iOS)