@LN: I have no problem with Flash platform, for the same reason you stated. It's too easy and very flexible to develop on and one can create wonderful things. I've problem with Flash Player. Again, as you said it's wonderful on Windows when you compare it to OSX. But I've gripe with Windows version as well. It's not as optimized as it should be.
I won't get into nitty-gritty of OSX innards, but I think that is only half of the story. I haven't developed or worked on SilverLight, so I can't do subjective benchmark of both plugins on either plaform. But I always found SilverLight to be much better implemented compared to Flash on Mac. One day I would like to check out developing on SL, just so that I can write a similar code for both and benchmark the crap out of both plugins on both platform. Anyway, coming back to Flash... I agree that Apple is no saint when it comes to controlling their OS and API access for developers, but as a developer/user of Flash technologies since Flash 3, I can agree on of thing with Jobs. Adobe guys ARE lazy (remember 64-bit CS4 on windows but not cocoa based CS4 on mac?). Every new iteration of Flash Player, we hope for more optimized version, but with each format it keeps getting sluggish. There have been lot of talk about GPU acceleration on 10.1, but the HW acceleration on current versions (since player ver.9) is lame and can cause more than good when used, in many cases.... and most of the bugs I encountered with HW Acceleration were on Windows. It's known that Flash Player's OSX implementation is bad, but have you seen it Linux? I don't think there is any restriction on APIs/System innards that would stop Adobe for writing a better version of Flash Player on linux, is it? I'm not saying each and every linux variant out there, but if they can even show a kick-ass flash player version on most popular ubuntu then I'll be convinced.
In the end of the day, both Apple and Adobe are notorious in their own ways, each have advantages of their own, but having seen things more deeply on the Flash issue, I can't help but side with Apple on this one. Imagine this, Adobe had three years since iPhone's debut, and they thought that iPhone or Apple can't do a jack to their web dominance. Now many sites are adopting alternate versions if not complete flash-less, of their content delivery. And I'm not talking just big sites, but many smaller private websites as well. My majority client base in US and in last one year almost 90% of my clients added alternate content for mobile devices and few of them even went flash less. Instead of coming up with better plan (something like iPhone optimized streamlined version of Flash Player or actually getting down to optimizing their Flash Player) Adobe sat of it's lazy fat bum like smug kid and now they are feeling the pinch. It will take a lot to obsolete flash from web, but if it starts to look so, even little, it's a bad news for Adobe. If they want to avoid it, they must get their act together and fix the issues from their end.
