>>I've been reading this guy's stuff:
http://cloudcomputingtopics.com/

Sounds good- except that mobile internet isn't constant. Reading the newspaper on a device only is tolerable as the network cuts in and out because the page is cached locally. Database apps need local caches too. HTML5 actually comes with local cursors for this reason, but IMHO devices keep growing hardware features that customers reasonably expect apps to make use of without needing a rewrite. Fox tried to achieve this last century with UI metadata and pcode interpreted by runtimes for each machine. Not perfect, but a good model to make apps work on any device without having to write multiple custom versions. Whereas HTML does require custom coding and even extensions to make use of different hardware features and soon there will be proprietary HTML extensions and here we go again.