But when you wrote,
No wonder everyone wants to move to web apps.
I initially thought you were being sarcastic: Because of course then, "this application may from time to time act like the web application it really is, and have unpredictable latencies or unreliable operation, ..."
But perhaps you were earnest, and were saying that people perceive web applications to be more reliable. Well, perhaps they can be a smooth experience, where your connection (and server) is fast, low latency and reliable. But in general it's not going to make the issue go away... Firefox is one of the few applications that crashes for me on OS X. :)