And as a side note, I hope the trend towards web-based applications comes to an end soon, at least as far pure HTML-based solutions are concerned. While they are obviously much easier to deploy and maintain, the user experience with a "fat" client is much better, I think. Maybe Java applets or XUL can improve this somewhat.

First of all, it depends whether you're talking about all applications that use the web as a delivery mechanism or only those that use HTML/CSS/Javascript for their interface. For the former, I don't see that going away any time soon, nor should it. Someone may propose a better mehanism, but no one has that I've seen.

For the latter, I agree with you that an open, portable platform for delivering rich client interfaces on the web would be very nice. XUL has the potential, but the market has not yet borne it out. But I don't think the current picture is so bleak that we need to either sit around waiting for this change to happen, or give up and start writing ActiveX controls in Visual Basic. The fact is, innovation in user interface design with dynamic HTML is not dead. Just look at Google: in both Gmail and Google Suggest they've built creative new interfaces using only standard web techniques, and in Google Desktop they've demonstrated the viability of using embedded web servers as a tool for desktop apps.