In theory, yes. In practice? Never.

If you stream a 720p YouTube video inside a VM and access it from Chrome or Firefox on a modern PC, you should see near-native quality and framerates. It’s not as fast streaming to an iPad just yet, but you’ll see some impressive changes there before long.

VNC isn't capable of providing a near-native experience for anything because it works from the top-down instead of from the bottom-up. Have you ever tried streaming 720p videos via VNC? The bandwidth it takes is ridiculous, and even on a gigabit LAN it doesn't provide the desired experience, let alone over the internet.

Also, I don't think there's a browser-based VNC implementation that will work on iOS or even Android (I don't mean Java plugins!) so there's that, too.