Heavy.
Heavy.
The only aspects I can think of right now that are lost in the translation are webpage roots and local # anchors. There might be a lot more, though.
I'm not knocking Android -- I'm an Android dev. The point I'm trying to make is that building out an ecosystem of interconnected links is hard. The web accomplished this by making the markup for those links very very simple. The total amount of code and setup for one Android application to launch another is far more complex than writing one anchor tag. This is at least a barrier to more widespread adoption of something like Open Intents, etc.
XHR requests are much more of an analog to Intents than <a> links are, and they are a similar order of complexity.
And how is Ajax not precisely an example of a website passing data back? It's all just servers responding with json or xml or html, whether it's a GET from an anchor tag or data from an Ajax call. I just don't make that distinction -- it's all HTTP to me.
I would hesitate to say that Ajax and Intents are precisely the same since with Intents app gets paused and waits, with Ajax the user will often expect the website to still be functional while the Ajax call is still working. If you click the up arrow on a comment you wouldn't expect the Reply button to not work until the Ajax request has called back.
That said, I never meant to indicate that there was a big difference between an XHR request and launching an intent; I was merely trying to point out that an <a> tag is notably different in functionality than both a ajax request or an intent launch.
Obviously feedback is an important feature, but one-way links are very useful low hanging fruit.