I've been using the web since 1994, and it's always distributed applications. I mean what were WAIS and Veronica except attempts to build applications - and they were (vastly inferior) predecessors to the web.
The web is the most ugly, horrible, messy, fantastic and beautiful Commons in human history and I love it.
Yes, people will block it and Balkenize it and make it ugly and make terrible apps that run horribly.
But it is better than anything else we've built, so there is that.