Since the iPhone has a REAL browser, then it has flash.
Yes the iPhone has a REAL browser, but Flash is a plug-in. If you remove the Flash plug-in from Safari on your Mac, it's still a real browser.
I'd say about 80percent of the sites I use have flash. Including this one. The ads are flash.
So what if you miss these processor-hogging loud Flash ads? I wouldn't miss them. If you remove the ads in your equation, I bet that less than 5% of the site you visit use Flash.
Most sites use flash for the interface. A web browser has to have flash or it is rendered completely useless. Buttons, menus, elements, navigation, etc. they all use flash.
That's ridiculous, sorry if it sounds mean, but you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Web sites
rarely use flash for their buttons, menus and interface. You must confuse this kind of interactivity with javascript, which is everywhere in web interfaces. Can you provide any specific example of a site that uses Flash for its interface? The only one I can think of is homestarrunner.com, which is a Flash cartoon site.
Heck, YouTube itself doesn't even use Flash for its interface. Aside from the YouTube video player, the rest of the site interface is based on javascript and css. Tell me, if all YouTube visitors automatically have Flash installed, why don't they build the rest of the interface with it?
There are three main reasons why Websites rarely use Flash for their interfaces:
1. Flash can be a processor-hog, particularly on Macs, having multiple Flash elements in a single page would make them slow down each-other. If you leave multiple windows open that have multiple Flash elements in them, it could be worse.
2. Flash content is hard to index by search engines, and impossible to use with a page translator. You cannot use the "Find" feature of a browser to find text that's inside a Flash element. Any utility, feature or script that does anything with good old html text will fail to do anything with Flash. Font size buttons in a browsers won't have any effects on Flash text for example.
3. Flash content doesn't scale like an html page does. Sure you make the whole Flash element bigger or smaller since it's mostly done with vectors, but it's nothing like html and css can do. Html and css enable the text content to flow around images, and resizing a window will make the text reflow to accommodate the different size. Flash can't do that, it doesn't even use standard scroll-bars.
Don't get me wrong, Flash can be great for highly interactive elements like games, but saying that most sites are unusable without Flash is simply not true. Try it, disable Flash and start surfing something outside YouTube and Flash games sites, your experience will go unchanged, except maybe for a few less annoying Flash ads.
Flash video is the most prevalent video out there. It's infinitely more versatile than QT. It can be embedded in animations, have other anims embedded in it, etc. So if you have a real browser, there's no need for a special youtube function. You have YouTube itself.
So, explain to me, why didn't Apple put a Flash player in the AppleTV and be done with it? Why would YouTube/Google waste time and money re-encoding everything to .h264? Putting Flash on the AppleTV would be trivial, it wouldn't even need to be re-compiled. Putting it on the iPhone isn't as simple, especially since it badly needs to be optimized on the Mac platform, even more-so for a limited cpu like the iPhone's.
If we didn't know about the YouTube on AppleTV announcement, your argument of "So if you have a real browser, there's no need for a special youtube function. You have YouTube itself." would be valid. But since we know that content will be available in higher quality, higher resolution .h264 format, Apple would be stupid not to integrate it on the iPhone, and that even if Flash support will probably be eventually added.