I wouldn't say so in and off itself but it can be argued using a thousandfold more resources to get the same functionality is wrong.
The reasons for this are manifold and not just coming from those making cross platform easy to hire for web tech. (Tho it would be nice if those web stacks were also less bloated) In a more ideal world we'd have a few cross UI options already and the companies behind OS's running them would have incentive to support that.
I was a system administrator when people were migrating away from Windows XP and after that debacle the appeal of Web apps was really clear. Doubly so with cell phones coming into the mix.
The Web stack probably isn’t what you’d come up with if you were starting from scratch. But are C, x86, or a lot of other standards we are living with? It seems like the ultimate demonstration of “worse is better:” people had the option of sitting around waiting for some nicely-designed, clean option that was cross-platform across all desktop devices and mobile devices, or they could piggyback on the Web. And with all the investment that’s gone into it as a result of that popularity, it is now fairly good anyway.
I'll agree with everything but "fairly good anyway" - I see most web pages and apps as only adequate, but they follow the current fashion (sigh)
By "only adequate" I mean full-of and/or based-on bad design patterns and techniques: eg. usual for active areas (buttons) to be not distinct from other areas; normal for pages to be based-on inefficient/heavy-weight toolkits (base gmail page is 10MB of download)...
I mean more in terms of being one of the quickest ways to get a functional AI that looks the way you want in front of people. Styling trends may butt up against usability but it's not as though using native code would have protected us from that -- look at Metro, for instance.
10MB might be a lot relative to what's going on (hard to think of many comparable applications that are as old as Gmail to me) but it's still a blip for most people's connections and certainly less trouble than using an installer.
