I've had a similar shock getting into iOS development. I'd never done any Cocoa coding before but had heard it praised so highly over the years that I assumed it was going to be all rolling fields and sunshine. But it really does feel primitive in many ways compared to the modern web. Apple will address some of the biggest pain points (layouts, styling) in their next set of OS releases but it's made me appreciate what I've taken for granted for so long in web UI.
I haven't written any apps in Android yet but I've been studying their UI docs and it's clear that their UI kit was informed by the web. If you squint at their code samples they don't look all that different from HTML5 apps: layout in markup, wireup event handlers, go.
The Microsoft visual designers are really easy to use. I was able to figure them out when I was 15 or 16 or so. I can wire together stuff in the wx* toolkits in code by hand.
XCode Interface Builder baffles me still. It's really garbage compared to Visual Studio, IMO. Really a shame.
I haven't written any apps in Android yet but I've been studying their UI docs and it's clear that their UI kit was informed by the web. If you squint at their code samples they don't look all that different from HTML5 apps: layout in markup, wireup event handlers, go.