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I'd say each of the annoyances has a historical reason for being there, but not a real reason as in "this is just the best way to do it". You make it sound like it's a cohesive platform that was designed to fulfill particular goals from the start, but it definitely wasn't.

I agree with you about the value of the web platform. It has a lot of advantages, especially from a business perspective, but it doesn't mean that it's a good platform.

This isn't the case for the desktop apps I care about at all. Ableton Live, Photoshop, XCode, MetaSynth, dozens of plugins for same, any number of video editors, look and feel nothing at all like a web app. Web-based versions of these will not be competitive any time in the forseeable future.

Your concerns about Apple's policies are legitimate but orthogonal.

>Also, quick questions -- what other platform has a nearly 100% market penetration rate and how does that compare to the iPhone's Cocoa?

I don't know, why don't you ask an iOS developer?

>AND, with the iPhone's Cocoa you're not even allowed to distribute or update your app, without going through iTunes, both of which have been problems far worse than whatever any regular web stack has caused me.

My straw man development team claims to have no problems with deployment.

iOS? Cross-platform compatibility? It looks like you posted this in response to someone else's comment.