This whole issue has been a long time coming. I think it goes back to culture following Macromedia's acquisition in 2005. Adobe's first release was updating Dreamweaver MX to 8 and it included little more than a poorly implemented code collapse feature on both Mac and PC versions. That was after two full years between versions.
A more recent example of Adobe's lack of support for Apple products specifically is in their flagship tool, Photoshop CS4. This product has never supported Spaces on OS X. Using Photoshop today in Spaces is a bungled mess.
Jobs introduced spaces almost four years ago. Adobe's own community support forum has
a thread a mile long from users asking why this was never implemented. The big question is whether CS5 will properly support this now basic aspect of OS X. This question was asked repeatedly in comments on
this official Adobe blog and is still unaddressed.
Yet, Adobe has no problem trumpeting a tool in CS5 that specifically undermines the intended method for creating apps on the iPhone OS. I haven't seen Apple suggest in any way that they are excited about intermediary translation tools as a way to get more apps into the app store. If anything, the rule of not allowing compiling within the app leads one to think that creating some type of compatibility layer is the wrong direction for their plans on the platform. Combine that with the idea that t
ranslated apps do not produce correct GUI or are somehow indicative of lack of a comprehensive development skillset and you've got a pretty solid argument that the business managers at Adobe should not have put all their chips in a flash-to-iPhone conversion tool.
Adobe has both a positioning problem and a technology problem. They need to be on the front foot of an authoring tool for HTML5. They also need to hit the reset switch on how they implement their tools on OS X. Three cheers for allowing Flash developers to still create for other mobile platforms, but general iPhone and iPad users are not going to suffer as a result of this decision.