We've also been pushing for web app models as developers as a collective quite hard. Not so much with the mobile side of things (all got dollared eyes maybe?) We will likely see a push back into the web side of things once mobile browsers become less painful to use and more powerful in what they can do.
In other words, "decline of the mobile web", yea right. (don't forget half the article was about how we're spending more and more time in mobile web over desktop web.)
This would be better phrased as "and there are still only a few places where they do". Google Docs, for example, is great for basic collaborative editing (as long as you don't mind the NSA reading it), but has a UI that it a total pain (especially the world's worst keyboard shortcuts, e.g. having ctrl-enter and shift-enter reversed, and completely lacks advanced features.
We all started using Gmail because synchronising to a mail server is annoying and PCs where slow. Ten years later machines have a fast internet connection, 1TB HDD as standard and, maybe an SSD. When you have to wait 10 seconds just to view an attachment syncing makes a lot of sense. But generating a thumbnail of that same PDF would be much better handled pre-emptively in the cloud.
The problem is believing that one approach is better for every function of an app. Few user machines will ever have a guaranteed large amount of bandwidth. This is just as true on desktop machines as mobile, but less acknowledged.