I'll tackle the meditative part first. For a long while I thought that desktop web applications were utterly pointless, because a) the GUI is there anyway, and b) embedded HTTP daemons cost so much in overhead (for example, I started playing with embedded Tomcat recently; cool concept but enormous RAM hog and a 10MB installation (which is a lot if you're offering something for download)). Then I saw the Google Desktop Search and that changed my opinion. So now my answer is "if it's the sort of thing that would make sense in a normal web app, it makes sense as a desktop web app."
For the SOPW, I usually prefer not to do it that way. I once tried capturing the body.onunload event in Javascript but I couldn't make it work reliably. So instead I have a big link or button on the page that says "Close Me" and that button calls a Javascript function which first sends a ping back to the server (using IFRAME or XmlHttpRequest) with a URL that indicates the client is exiting and then calls window.close().
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