>And that's where, in my experience, JS has a leg up.

I have to disagree with this. Creating a form which displays a list of users and another to edit their details is trivial in, say, .NET's winforms. With [PHP,Python,Whatever]/HTML/JS it's a comparatively painful exercise. No form designer, you have to worry about low level stuff like data binding, the default styling is too basic to be of use. It's a major step backwards, hence people being excited about Meteor (http://www.meteor.com/) - it's finally bringing back the RAD tools that we've been lacking for so long.