Isn't Apple's announcement bad for society?

I would think that creating a locked in format that will be incompatible with everything would be the worst thing to do, and that creatives wouldn't stand for it. Graphic and Multimedia designers that I know of are still feeling the effects of Adobe's problems with Flash, why should we support another non-open, non-standard format? Won't we in the future be complaining that we have to find someone who still has an iPad in order to get this material into a usable format?