This is a naive interpretation. It's easy to imagine that "application quality or capability" is some easily measured metric tied to easy to measure numbers (like FPS or megahertz). In reality for many applications performance is not the long pole, so moving them to the web adds many advantages. I find it weird that someone could make the claim that "web apps set us back 20 years" in 2013, when web apps have transformed the world economy so tremendously (google search, web mail, amazon, online banking and investing, etc.)