I wouldn't characterize web layout as "awesome." Look at the contortions required for basic tasks like equal height columns.
I would. I've been doing web development for a long time, along with many other types of development, and although there are quirks (as there are with anything), you can do nearly anything via web layouts. The flexibility of the system, and things people have accomplished with it, is really amazing when you stand back and look at it as a whole.
For example, look at email clients. The native mail apps on my Mac and iPad can show me all of my inbox in one big list. I can scroll through tens of thousands of messages naturally, easily jump to the bottom or top of the list, etc.
Web pages cannot support this. Yahoo mail attempts to present the messages in one big list, but the experience is pretty bad. The scroll bar looks fake and feels wrong, find doesn't work like you'd expect, the scroll thumb changes size and jumps around as you scroll, scrolling to the bottom is Sisyphean, etc. And Yahoo mail is one of the better webmail clients.
Gmail didn't even try. Instead it refuses to show more than 100 messages at a time, with buttons to paginate.
When I work on web pages, I don't get a feeling of freedom or flexibility. Instead I find myself forced to compromise on the user experience over and over again, just like Google and Yahoo did with their webmail clients.
Frankly, a list of tens of thousands of messages sounds completely worthless to me. The first email application I've ever really liked and use all the time is Gmail. I think Google helped to redefine what the email interface should be, so much so that other desktop apps sought to imitate many of their features.
I believe that some of the limitations on performance actually force developers to build better interfaces than what you'd get if a desktop application was built in its place. I have to focus on what is most important and determine the best way to deliver that functionality to you. I suppose that's why I find myself anymore using web applications far more than desktop apps. The only native desktop apps I use anymore are things that I have to have the performance for (IDE's, Photoshop, etc...)