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Android already supports Theora, WebM, and H.264 -- what do you feel its native support is lacking?

Manufacturers put Flash on tablets/phones as mindless "differentiation", an extra checkbox to wave in front of consumers. There's no technical reason for Android to support Flash, and (as this article demonstrates) numerous good reasons not to.

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Forgetting that there is a ton of popular flash content on the web? Outside the developer community, people don't care about how the content they're interested in is delivered, they just want access. It isn't hard to criticize the implementation of flash on mobiles, but there are obviously strong arguments for including it on a platform. It's clearly a LOT more than an 'extra checkbox'.

Right. Thanks to flash compatibility on my phone, I can watch/listen to a lot of content that cannot be rendered on an iDevice. That's a meaningful differentiator.

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