To be an application, you certainly don't need to meet the levels of interactivity, responsiveness, or robustness as Textmate or Photoshop. Maybe to you that's what an application is, but under a more standard definition all a piece of software needs to do to be considered an application is to interact with a user to do a specific task. It has nothing to do with value judgements. A crappy cgi guestbook is technically a web application. It doesn't matter that it's slow and only does one thing.