I miss aspects of it, for sure. What I think you're getting at here is that we used to have a cleaner separation of protocol, data format, and client application - enabling us to have multiple ways of combining the above. Tons of email clients, tons of formats, but ultimately just one email namespace - the DNS. That's much more idiomatically Internet than webapps are, which rely on my browser very carefully executing instructions provided by a site with very little control on my part as to what they do with the chunk of screen real-estate they've been afforded.

There's also something about the snappiness of desktop apps on hardware 1/100th the speed of what we're running now that I dearly miss.