Adobe need Apple a whole lot more than Apple need Adobe.
I think that pretty much sums it up.
It's interesting to see that most of the sensible, considered criticism comes from people who have actually worked with Flash, and the stupid comments from the average Apple-basher. Flash was always a neat idea, but its implementation falls short - particularly in the ways that Apple identified. When you have a lot of processing power (and bandwidth, typically), and the ability to recover easily from thread crashes, it generally works fine. Trying to run it in the efficient, low power, low processing power of smart phones (particularly the iPhone, where performance and efficiency are intentionally tightly controlled by the OS environment) is challenging at best, and a waste of time at worst.
What seems extraordinary about this argument is that everyone (particularly the Windoze world, but even Adobe itself) seems to have taken it as a battle between companies, when it's really just a battle for standards. Since Apple is actually promoting HTML5, the only real open standard in this area (yes, yes, I know anyone can use Flash), for various good reasons, it's difficult to see why it's portrayed as a religious war (like Mac vs PC, for example). Either Flash or HTML5 will win (hopefully on their merits), or we'll have to use both (at the same time), and neither Apple nor Adobe will disappear. Their best products (Macs/iPhone/iPad/iPod and Photoshop/Acrobat etc, respectively) will continue to be leaders in their class, and the two companies will continue to support each others' products.
There also seem to be lots of people who equate market share with quality. It doesn't work in politics, so why should it work in business? There are plenty of bad products with large market share. Of course, if it's strength you're interested in, then maybe look instead at profitability and growth...
