"It's that he thinks that the web will win (over app stores). I strongly believe that he's right there."
"Whoever can make the Google of app discovery might make a temporary splash, but i bet that, not long after, people will return to plain old Google Search."
You remember me to Kodak's "people will return to make analog photos, people want to hold something in their hand".
You are deluding yourself, and you can't see what you have in front of your eyes.
No, there is not a single platform that works in everything. In my company we do both low level programming(c, c++[small controlled subset so we control it]. embedded, microcontrollers, hardware) , and high level programming (python, java, web programing in general) for scripts, testing , rapid prototyping or deployment...
Both of them work very well for what they are designed for.
If we paint something in the screen in c we could do it in 0.001 seconds(without hardware accel!!), in python it is 0.5 seconds, 500 slower!!. In the browser is like 500 if we were to do things on javascript. Most people fake and call webgl with hard pre calculations done in a server(native) "web programming". It is not.
And we use python a lot. Because we don't care if something takes 5 seconds to draw if this saves hours or days of debugging.
In the future communications will be better, and program interaction will be stronger, but that does not mean that all software will be web. Multiplattform native works also very well, and much better for some things.
"Given that the world's #1 mobile OS is made by the worlds #1 web company, this change is not difficult to predict."
Android is not web for a reason. It sucks for lots of things. It is not that Google has not tried, as it is in their best interest to do so.
The interest of a web company are something, and the interest of consumers are something else.
Consumers probably don't like having to be connected all day, all what they do in their computers being monitored in real time and stored forever by the NSA.
You probably are American but there is people living in other countries, with different interests. As Snowden said the NSA uses their tools for industrial espionage(as should be expected).
If you have a company outside the USA you will have no brain if you used web for your secret sauce. They will take it from you, they will give it to an American company and even patent it. With native it is orders of magnitude harder to do this.