Have Web browser apps finally come of age?

In the past, I've evaluated Web apps and discarded them as being a waste of time for the following reasons:

1.    They are very slow.
2.    They were hard to print from.
3.    They didn't have adequate window controls.
4.    They didn't have an adequate window layout system.
5.    They mixed data and presentation together.
6.    The web browsers weren't standardised.
7.    They didn't have a powerful client side language.
8.    They didn't allow the use of include files.

All of these things, with the exception of slow response times are changing.

Web browsers today have:

1.    Fast rendering engines.
2.    Intelligent printing e.g. modern browsers will automatically split a print job across a table by splitting on the row and printing the table headers on the new page.  In the past a row would be chopped in half.  They also have useful options like page counters and date of the print job.  Firefox is leading the pack in the printing department.  I use it to print the invoices I generate from GNUCash (if you're looking for small business accounting software, check it out.  After evaluating a number of desktop and Internet based packages, I chose GNUCash, due to it's maturity and customisability.  It uses Scheme for it's embedded language).
3.    The introduction of tabs has been a major development, but they still don't have the sophisticated controls available to desktop developers.
4.    The introduction of Cascading Style Sheets is one of the main reasons I'm now looking more closely at Web development.  CSS means that a developer can now completely separate presentation from content.  Pages can now be coded up in basic XHTML with no formatting of any kind.  They will appear on the page sequentially.  With the liberal use of <div></div> content boxes and CSS the content can appear anywhere in the browser window. This still isn't as easy to do as it is in Fox-Toolkit, but it's getting close.
5.    Before CSS, web development was a mess.  HTML tags had to contain all sorts of markup for font-sizes, font-styles, dimensions for the control and colors just to mention a few.  Now all of this presentation markup can be removed and all presentation can be organised from the external style sheet.
6.    Web browsers weren't standardised and there were lots of different client-side binary formats competing for attention e.g. ActiveX, Java applets, Flash applets.  Thankfully, these have gone away and Javascript has largely won the battle for client-side control.
7.    As mentioned above Javascript has now been accepted as the default client-side scripting language.  It has come ahead in leaps and bounds.  Two areas in particular deserve mention, DOM and JSON.  DOM provides a reference for all elements on a web page using a tree structure.  The entire tree can be quickly navigated using Javascript to locate, add, delete and manipulate elements at run-time.  JSON is a text based data format, that naturally co-exists with Javascript.  It is a simple matter to create and parse JSON objects using Javascript.
8.    Web browsers can use include files as a matter of course.  Your web page can include any number of CSS and Javascript files.  Three advantages accrue from this remote coupling.
    a)    Web pages can be kept small.
    b)    Multiple CSS files enable presentation to be customised for different devices.
    c)    The Javascript code files which rarely change can be minified and cached locally by the Web browser.  This will speed up web applications substantially.