Not including flash on a tablet seems like a mistake to me. It's one thing on a cell phone, but quite another on a device that will probably be positioned as a casual use computer.
There's a larger strategic issue here. HTML 5 is going to reduce a lot of the need for Flash and Flash in turn is going to be forced back into it's traditional market of providing streaming media solutions. In that role they are Apple biggest competitor both in format (Quicktime) and content (streaming media competing with iTunes)
By keeping Flash off the iPhone and the tablet Apple is taking their very high income audience and telling web site developers "Support us or risk losses in advertising". In doing that they're using the iPhone and the tablet to further the company as a whole. Something that might be worth losing a few sales in the short run
And you thought the iPhone was just Apple's way of muscling into the mobile business! No, it’s really a proactive battle against a wide swatch of proprietary platforms promising to plague a new wave of mobile devices."
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/879DD82D-559...
It also makes commercial sense - they don't want people playing flash games on the web, they want them buying games from the appstore.
Yeah, well the future also isn't here yet.
Flash still has much relevance for any web-surfing focused product shipping today.
The future is now for websites and browsers that support it.
I do about 1/3 of my internet surfing on my iPhone, at least an hour or two a day and I rarely miss the Flash. In fact, I'd say I'm actually glad it's not there. Most of my major online annoyances are Flash powered.
Almost every mainstream site has verified mobile Webkit compatibility and/or dedicated applications. The group of people who still need Flash in that scenario is small enough that leaving it out wouldn't likely have a measurable effect on adoption.
For a web product from a company that can't command as much market attention, shipping without Flash might well be a death knell. But Apple's different. The App Store is different.
Non-windows versions of flash have turned out to be incredibly inefficient: relatively simple flash banner ads make my otherwise near idle mac go wild. From what I've seen, it's even less efficient on Linux. Battery life is still going to be a huge concern for the apple tablet. If adobe gets its sh*t together, it may yet come to the tablet/iPhone OS. Until that time, it would be ridiculous for apple to allow that poorly designed of a virtual machine onto its otherwise energy efficient hardware.
I imagine Apple has it's own ideas for how media on the tablet should work.