Welcome back, Fill. Been a while indeed.
I'll echo Bubba's and add the following:
The "web apps is going to kill the desktop" argument is of course only supported by those who develop for the web exclusively or almost exclusively. That alone should tell you something. It's nothing you haven't heard already: "mobile devices will deprecate the pc", "the web will kill the television", "netbooks will obsolete notebooks", "wind turbines will replace coal", ad nausea
But things are more or less like this:
- Software still needs to be built to support upstream and downstream web apps.
- As long as we support our entire net experience in a fundamentally insecure 40 years old set of communications protocols and backed by a extremely slow (by several magnitudes) communications physical infrastructure, user applications will keep thriving in all areas of development and client-server architectures will keep being built to support everything (from businesses, to entire governments and even users at home).
What we are experiencing is a boom of web development backed by technological developments in that area (notably programming languages and devices) that give the false impression of substitution. But in fact, the immense interest exists only because before there was nothing and that void is now being filled at the speed of light. And that's all there is to it.
As for your predicament, twice in my career I experienced a similar problem. Slowly, or fast, you cannot really tell, you got sucked into web development. And when you realized it, you were doing nothing else and not really enjoying the experience. What I did on my case was put an end to it by switching jobs when I realize I wasn't allowed to go back. I did appreciate the experience though, because today I do have marginal knowledge in web development and that goes into the resume also. But my advice is that; try to sort it out with them. If you can't, start looking for a job and when you find it, quit.
