Since it's probably past the point of being editable, I just want to put the standard "conflict of interest"/"shameless plug" disclaimer on this parent comment, since it was posted by one of my colleagues at famo.us. We'll make sure to better disclose these things next time.

That being said, the approaches we're exploring with famo.us (a retain-mode scene graph) is absolutely essential for allowing web apps to compete with native apps. This approach is often overlooked by web developers who grew up on the web and are not familiar with how native windowing and retain-mode UI systems function.