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Personally, I much prefer using a GUI app sitting on my machine rather than a web app (pretty funny since I'm teaching a graduate course in web systems and algorithms the semester). Anyone who's tried to use google's spreadsheet or document editor online know what I'm talking about.
I'm sure all of the 22-year-old "VPs of engineering" lurking in the coffee shops in the mission district of San Francisco think I'm just an old guy. It's true. I'm old, but that doesn't mean that don't want to use good software. As Cay Horstmann's JavaOne blog points out
But my feeling is that there is a continued need for the desktop. Information consumers won't care, but information producers do. Someone needs to write code, write books, do art layout, run complex calculations. The desktop has been pretty well optimized for that. Java and JavaFX have the chance to dominate that market while everyone else chases consumer tablets.
There are good reasons not to build web application sometimes. Aside from the difficulty of building rich clients beyond some gee-whiz JavaScript, the first thing I have to do with a web application is come up with a Web server somewhere. This exposes me to security issues and I have to figure out how to get two computers to communicate instead of using method calls.