I agree 100% with your comments about web support. The web features they tried in Access (not including the weird ActiveX powered thing pre-Access 2010) were really replacing Access with a dramatically different solution. As you point out, not just the infrastructure changes, but also the whole design/coding experience.

That said, connecting directly to a database over the Internet is (for most companies) insane. Even if it could be made performant, the security issues are a nightmare. But I still think Microsoft could have added something else into that void — even a way to generate read-only data Access web services would have been something.