cough lags-and-stops-responsonding-if-you-sneeze-too-hard-on-a-24GB-ram-machine-visual-studio-2013? cough
cough spazzes-out-randomly-when-you-type-characters-xcode? cough
sublime text? (which to be fair, is pretty amazing)
It's all relative. I've used plenty of really shit 'native graphics' applications (especially cross platform ones); on the other hand, plenty of stuff in the list (https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit/wiki/List-of-apps-a...) work just great for me.
shrug
I don't think you can discount the entire run time just one the basis of one app.
Although switching to an SSD made PyCharm a lot faster.
I tried atom a week ago and it was extremely slow, much slower than LightTable. Almost 30s startup times and it was extremely slow at opening large files and even slower when trying to scroll through them.
Whereas LightTable is an IDE, but the limitations of windowing and feature layout were showing heavily in it's interface. node-webkit to me, seems like it's good for a particular type of application interface, rather then something very general purpose.
One of the ironies about the "Write once, Run many" mantra for HTML5 is that it's mostly applied to phones, where the runtime presents numerous challenges. On the desktop, however, HTML5 runtimes are faster and more feature-rich, so this is really where the portable aspect of HTML5 can excel. Adding Node to the mix makes it powerful too, going beyond regular browser capabilities.