Reply #26: Actually, my apologies.

[Touchdown]

I guess I did come off as snide. It's just that before the iPad was announced, most people were sick of Flash, and annoyed by all the pop up ads that follow the mouse around a site... so much so that Flash blocking software became popular. That, and nobody really even cared about Flash or even knew what it did.

Then all of the sudden, iPad was announced, and just like the iPhone before it, Flash is the most important thing to prevent a nuclear winter. And to hear Adobe boast that "90% of the internet runs on Flash" belies the fact that 90% of that 90% are annoying ads.

Now, it is also true that Adobe has not been able to make any version of their flashes reliable for not only Macs, but for most touch screen interfaces and especially smart phones. Flash 10 is supposed to solve that, but it's not ready until September, and the iPad is out now. So what is Apple to do? Load a buggy, memory hogging, largely incompatible with touch screens version of Flash, to where if it clogs up the iPad, the users blame Apple instead of Adobe with it, or release it the way it is, and get Adobe to fix the problems with their software first?

So, yes. There are perfectly valid reasons why it's not there.