I'm not sure that the point is necessarily that the browser should be competing with native pro apps. Web apps tend to be really good at very specialized funct

I'm not sure that the point is necessarily that the browser should be competing with native pro apps. Web apps tend to be really good at very specialized functions. A silly, but I think still valid example would be a meme generator using <canvas> and JS. If you want a picture of a cat with some white Arial text and a black drop shadow, a web app is going to be great. It'll probably be faster than Photoshop (especially if you count startup time), and way more accessible. Same thing goes for the Web Audio API. Will we see a full-fledged Pro Tools competitor? Probably not. But we will see ringtone generators and voice recorders and (hopefully!) some T-Pain AutoTune apps. Great web apps are all about playing off the web's strengths, not trying to replicate the desktop.