Better could mean "More Fun" or "Higher Status" or "Higher Pay" or "Greater Job Security" or many other things.
I have seen situations where the UI construction is outsourced while the core services are seen as mission critical and kept in house. So in that organisation it seems clear what is most valued.
As we get towards UI development the skill sets can shift a bit, the aesthetics and visual skills, concerns for usability start to be more valuable. Folks who work mostly on services and middleware may feel less comfortable in that UI space. Hence if you talk to the server-side guys they might say "More Fun here".
Maybe you could survey the job market and compare salaries of UI developers and server-side developers.
My opinion: there are fundamentally different mind-sets between working in "Application" and "Service". Some individuals feel much more at home in one or the other, and great developers in either have fulfilling careers. Some (but not all) developers seem to be able to seemlessly shift between the mind sets.