edit: BTW, I see your comment was downvoted while I was writing mine. I just wanted to say that I did not downvote yours; you make good points about Facebook and YouTube, to be sure.
I use the Gmail web interface daily because its keyboard shortcuts for labeling, archiving, and deleting are unbeatable for triaging my inbox, but it pales in comparison to Outlook 2007, 2010, and 2013 for composing and scheduling (and I schedule against an Apps for Business account, not Exchange). In particular, pinning search folders like "Unread Mail" to the "favorites" area is invaluable to me because I filter a lot of my mail with "skip inbox" and "keep unread" so lower priority mail doesn't clutter my inbox or distract me with push alerts, but I want easy access to it later. I've tried using g + l "unread" in the Gmail web interface to replace that, many times, but the experience is just so much worse that I don't find it usable at all.
Gmail has top-notch spam detection, and there's no need to wait while thousands of emails download, which is great. As for negatives, I find the GMail interface to be cluttered and confusing, with its ads, the annoying black bar at the top, random hovering elements, and the occasional exhortation to Buzz / gchat / new Compose experience / whatever it is this week. The UI is unpleasant to spend extended periods in, which isn't conducive to thoughtfulness. Also, its search is bad ("1-20 of many"), so I am uncomfortable storing important data in it.
It's part of a larger pattern. The web is for large quantities of stuff, with low signal to noise; desktop apps are for focusing. I read blog posts on the web, I read books with a native app. I watch cat videos on YouTube, I watch movies with native players. I think this separation is robust.
Incidentally, YouTube does have a native iOS app, which I find to be much better than the web site on my iPad. The same is true for Hulu, NetFlix, and ABC's player. Oh, and Facebook!
Interesting point, noted!
> YouTube does have a native iOS app, which I find to be much better [..] on my iPad
Yup, hence my spelling out that there's no native desktop app. With mobile apps we have a few confounding factors:
* less-powerful processors that may be unacceptably slowed down by the HTML/JS layer
* immaturity of multitouch and notification APIs in JavaScript
* limited (if any?) support for putting pure web apps on your home screen, or in an app store
As the APIs mature and tablet and smartphone processors get faster, I expect there to be fewer and fewer reasons to do fully-native apps. But yes, of course, they do offer a better experience today.
Using the gmail web interface for work email would drive me nuts. Email can be pretty important to me so it's something that needs to be omnipresent on my desktop.
This is where thunderbird integrated with Ubuntu/Unity is perfect. When I have a new email I get to see the sender and subject instantly on the top right of the screen, the notification icon lights up and the launcher icon tells me how many unread emails I have.
If I were using gmail I would have to keep a tab open and would spend half of the day OCD switching tabs to check if I had anything important.
Of course you could fix this by adding notification features to gmail that integrate with the desktop and showing it in a window that is distinct from my other browser windows.
But then is it really a web app or is it a desktop app that happens to be written in JS?
Maybe these users do have personal Hotmail or Gmail accounts. However, for anything serious and work-related, they're very likely using Outlook, Lotus Notes, Mail.app, Thunderbird, or one of the numerous other native email clients.
Many people, especially those in management, sales, accounting, finance or other communication-heavy areas of business, often spend many hours each workday using a native email client, on both the desktop and on mobile devices.
Within technical and academic circles, and also the open source community, many people prefer native email clients because they're so much more powerful than the web-based clients.
Furthermore, I personally know a lot of people who have an @gmail.com account, but they essentially always use it from a native client via IMAP and SMTP, rather than using the web interface. They use it mainly because it's free, and because of its large storage space, rather than because of its web interface.
The important thing though is that it launches fullscreen and attaches to the unity dock as an independent application whereas with Windows it's just a website that you browse to.
I think that the way it integrates on Ubuntu actually makes much more sense in many ways. Though VLC integration would obviously be the most superior option.
Maybe it's a matter of age — I suspect you might be a little older than me and the crowd I hang out with (mostly mid-20s). From my vantage point web apps have obviously already replaced many categories of native apps, and are on the way to replace more. It seems as if you are denying something that already happened.