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Right, so by 2040 we can't distribute an application without rebuilding it for 5 or 6 different architectures5 or 6? 2040? All we've seen over the past 20 years is the gradual reduction of in-use architectures down to a few winning players. We're even seeing it in the SoC/MCU space now, where custom architectures are being replaced with ARM.
I expect to continue to see evolution and simplification, not revolution. If there is a revolution, well, we'll want to take advantage of the power of that fancy new hardware, I suppose.
> one of which is a bitcode format that doesn't even run at native speeds, despite the name.
PNaCL generates native code from the bitcode.
[response to your edit]
> You're basically demonstrating the entire problem with the Native Client camp - you're so myopically focused on the immediate needs and the immediate environment (arm! x86! games! performance this year!) that you have absolutely no appreciation for the trail of destruction being left for future generations.
I would say that you're demonstrating why the web camp continues to fail so horribly to move past simple applications: you're so myopically focused on the ideology of tomorrow over providing a great user experience today.
In fact, I day say you're leaving a far worse trail of destruction, because web applications are the ultimate expression of always-on DRM. When the servers for your "apps" disappear in a few years time, the applications will disappear right along with them -- forever.
How is the Internet Archive going to archive your webapp?
> You have Pepper which is a huge bastardized, specialized clone of all WebGL/HTML 5 audio/media APIs
That's an overstatement of Pepper. It's quite simple -- far more so than the massive browser stack that WebGL+HTML5 brings with it.
In fact, Pepper is simple and constrained enough that someone other than an existing browser vendor or major corporation could actually implement and support a standalone implementation of it. By contrast, producing a compatible browser is such an enormous undertaking that even companies like Opera are giving up and tracking WebKit.