Web technologies on GUI apps

Question

I developed many GUI applications for the Windows platform during my early professional career, and saw several GUI frameworks come, have whole magazines devoted to them, and then fade away. MFC is iconic.

Tasked with writing yet another GUI application, I starter researching cross-platform frameworks like Qt and WxWindows. I found the same steep learning curves I knew from before, and tooling doesn't help much in building a functional and elegant user interface because its clumsy and complicated.

But people are building beautiful and functional UIs on the Web all the time (look at this site!). The standards, the libraries, and the tools are certainly there.

My thought and my question: Why not write a GUI in which most of the UI is handled by an embedded browser? I already know that the Qt widgets support a large part of CSS and JavaScript, and programmers with good knowledge about web development are relatively easy to find, ..., so...

Have you done something like that before? What's your experience/advise?

A browser widget will likely support a subset of the functionality of mainstream browsers, but enough to produce a rich user interface using web technologies. There's the added advantage of the enormous simplifications possible when the web-stuff doesn't have to talk to a server to service UI requests.

My idea is not to embed a full-blown browser (yikes!). It is to enable the use of web technologies in GUI programming.

[Edit]

I haven't accepted an answer because the ones so far are suggestions about doing something else, and not about previous experience doing what I suggest. They're not even opinions or speculations about the pitfalls or benefits of doing it the suggested way, which is what I would expect in the unlikeliness that I'd be breaking new ground by using a browser widget to provide part of a GUIs interface. Think HTML, CSS, and limited JavaScript, with no Internet, no .Net or Java (or Air or Flex/Flash), no relational database; just executables, libraries, and templates that can be installed by copying them, and persistence to the user's home directory using the file system.

Some Addtional Related Questions

These are drawn from the answers so far:

1. User experience: Isn't the WebApp that runs StackExchange rich and intuitive enough?
2. User expectations: Hasn't the Web, and aren't portable gadgets (smartphones and tablets) moving the user experience away from the traditional GUI?
3. Could it be that there apps that must be GUI but benefit from being webified while other's don't?