Open, widely adopted standards are a good thing. Widely supported ways of delivering applications written using those standards is also a good thing.

But as a counterpoint to the rest, web technologies have been free to achieve said parity on the desktop for a long time now. Have they? Do they provide _better_ experience for the user? or do they neglect the user whenever they can in return for _faster_ and _easier_ cross-platform development and ability to leverage existing web developers?