Developers will never give up a real operating system. You just can't develop on consumer devices like the iPad; these are designed for consumers, they come with many limitations to make the consumer's experience easy and smooth, but at the cost of hackability.
Right, but whatever directions things go towards, do you really think that developers will use "browsers" as the operating system?
Look at photographers. Despite all the consumer level digital cameras that have flooded the market, professional photographers (and even hobbyists) still buy the more expensive (and more complicated) cameras that a consumer would probably never buy.
Assembly to C is not the same thing as Unix to Chrome.
Your argument would work if, say, people start writing operating systems in Python.
Another important thing to realize: there's a big difference between the OS and the GUI. The GUI might very well be implemented on top of "web" technologies, but that's not enough to say that the OS is the browser.
Well, the portability improvement from Assembly to C is mirrored in browser applications compared to native one in my view. The Browser today abstract a lot of things for you now including network communications, device interaction, file system interactions, graphics... the list goes on.
These aren't all GUI related things. I strongly believe you can now have a OS that is basically booting you into a browser and all OS interaction would go through WebAPI and still build most applications we use today.Obviously there will always be cases which you need to drop down a level.
Developers of ChromeOS or boot to gecko seem to agree somewhat.
Windows 8 supports HTML/JS for creating apps using WinRT, but it's hardly usable in any web browser like Enyo apps are. Not to mention the ability for creating apps using .NET or C++ are still very much a possibility--perhaps even preferred.
It has not really changed in the last 40 years or so though. I would be surprised about a radical change in 5. I don't see replace the OS companies at YC yet either.
Not even tablets will run on top of browsers.
Developers will never give up a real operating system. You just can't develop on consumer devices like the iPad; these are designed for consumers, they come with many limitations to make the consumer's experience easy and smooth, but at the cost of hackability.