I have lightly used both web UI stuff and native UI stuff, and on the desktop at least, web UI concepts are lightyears ahead. I think native UI development for PCs will return when and if the concepts there catch up with the present state of the abstractions and patterns that work for web dev. GTK, the one I know the best, is still in an era where object orientation is a new and technically difficult thing to achieve. Not bad at all, but we can do things so much more advanced than that if we port over the lessons learned when inventing ways to manipulate and efficiently push updates to the document object model.

There are some projects working on this but they are not yet at the level of "copy paste works," or "you can use either a retina or non-retina display and it won't look badly scaled or blurry on either." But I hope this will be sorted out soon because there is a lot of software I want to write with it.