Could you ever imagine pro video editing (i.e. Adobe Premiere / After Effects) 100% within Chrome
Depends. With WebGL / WebCL, I can imagine preview effects there quite easily. I can also imagine that it would be nice to be able to do the real rendering runs on a rack somewhere else. The more difficult thing is imagining the multiple GBs of data between the two. Possibly uploading the raw source data to the server and keeping the local copy and just syncing the non-destructive editing instructions would work.
The "problem of needing offline access" most certainly has not been solved
Note that HTML5 does allow effectively unlimited (policy set by the user) local data to be storage and applications that run completely disconnected. It's possible to write a web app that uses the browser for the UI, but only uses the network for software updates.
You can show me the micro-benchmarks all day long; doesn't change the fact that a complex UI in JavaScript is vastly slower.
You're conflating JavaScript and DOM. With FTL, JavaScriptCore can run C code compiled via Emscriptem to JavaScript at around 60% of the speed of the same C code compiled directly. That's not a huge overhead (40% is a generation old CPU, or a C compiler from 5 years earlier). Transitions from JavaScript (or PNaCl compiled code) to the DOM, however, are very expensive. This is why a lot of web apps just grab a canvas or WebGL context and do all of their rendering inside that, rather than manipulating the DOM. Optimising the DOM interactions without sacrificing security is quite a difficult problem.
No, they are again. During the Pentium 4 era, they were behind on pretty much every metric. They only survived because of name recognition and AMD not having the production capacity to take more than about 20% of the market share. At the mid to low end, an Athlon system with the same performance was cheaper than anything Intel sold. At the high end, Opterons were roundly trouncing Xeons in absolute performance and performance per dollar.
The Pentium M was when it started to turn around for Intel - the laptop market started to grow rapidly and AMD was only just competitive on performance per Watt, but didn't have the laptop motherboard makers onboard. With the Core 2, Intel retook the performance crown.
which has the cheap option of an hour-long metro ride (using that word, since most of it is above ground), but there's also the "premium" Heathrow Express train, which takes about 15 minutes
Assuming that you're starting near Paddington. From Kings Cross (i.e. where anyone coming from north of London will arrive), between the Tube and the waiting time, it takes about the same time to get the Tube to Paddington and change to the Heathrow Express as it does to take the Tube directly from Kings Cross to Heathrow. There were plans to extend the Heathrow Express, at least to Liverpool Street, and possibly to Kings Cross, but they seem to have been lost somewhere.
You probably don't need to wait. There are lots of parts of the US and Europe where the cost of living is much lower than the big tech hubs. I was freelancing for about five years in one of them. One day of consulting per month covered my cost of living, everything else went either on savings or luxuries. A lot of the big companies are very happy to employ people on this basis (Red Hat had several people living near me, for example). They're paid a bit less than a Valley salary, so the company saves a reasonable amount, they work from home (so the company doesn't have to provide an office - if there are a cluster of them then they might rent somewhere, but it's a lot cheaper than in a tech hub), and the employees have a lot more disposable income because the cost of living is so much lower. Everyone wins.
You're not really avoiding offshoring though, you're just benefitting from the same economic conditions that make it beneficial. The number one problem with offshoring to India for tech companies is employee retention - the good ones don't stay around very long. A lot of companies are very happy to save a bit on office space and salary and have a known-competent employee who will stick around for a while.
Going the speed of light is bad for your age.