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>The move to "web-page-apps" is not about eye candy, it's about speed, responsiveness and yes, usability

No, it is about following fads, just as web development has always done. Creating sites that are slower, less responsive, and offer terrible usability is clearly not done for reasons of speed, responsiveness and usability. Enhancing a page with javascript can increase responsiveness and usability. Replacing the page with javascript is moronic.

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There are cases where a "full Javascript" page provides clear benefits (eg, GMail).

Perhaps I should have been more clear. I'm just talking about web pages, basically just information exchange. Twitter being the example here. Browser applications are a different thing, and obviously have to be delivered in javascript. There's nothng wrong with browser applications, but pretending web pages should be built as browser applications is insanity.

GMail is just some text and links too. Why does it get a free pass, but twitter doesn't?

GMail does have a no-javascript fallback, that has all of the important functionality.

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