And yet Steve forced it by keeping Flash off of iOS making its users the “extreme minority” of non flash users. And the rest is history of course.
Thing is, there were a lot of very strong arguments for not having Flash on a mobile device: CPU-heavy, power-hungry, potential security hole, proprietary video/audio codecs (some of the "legacy" codecs couldn't be accelerated by mobile hardware) and some flash content had hard-coded UI features that just plain didn't work on a touchscreen ...and that was a couple of years later when Flash for Android appeared and processors had got a bit snappier - it would probably have run like frozen treacle on an early iPhone/iPT/iPad). Adobe dropped the Android version of Flash player after a year or two, and nothing of value was lost.