The thing is, even if all of the currently "common" hardware features become part of some standard, there will be additional features in the future that will no

The thing is, even if all of the currently "common" hardware features become part of some standard, there will be additional features in the future that will not, and browser-based applications will not be able to take advantage of this hardware as quickly as native applications can. So, as long as you're comfortable waiting for WC3 to "bless" support for a device, and then browser vendors to turn out apps (which are these so-called irrelevant native apps themselves), then in that case I agree.