The important thing to keep in mind is that by "deploy" I mean "install" -- the goal is to make CouchApps as easy to share / replicate / install on end-user dev

The important thing to keep in mind is that by "deploy" I mean "install" -- the goal is to make CouchApps as easy to share / replicate / install on end-user devices like cellphones and laptops. Once you have a fully replicating application, you want to run it as close to the user as possible to avoid network latency. I don't think the deployment challenges of large centralized apps will go away, but there are a lot of apps that better fit the decentralized model. Now that CouchDB makes decentralized web apps possible, we'll get to see what can be done.