Mojo, you're confusing Quicktime with Flash. And Flash's "popularity" for streaming video is owed to its use on YouTube. The implementation (site) pushed the popularity, not the underlying format itself. I'd argue that's better known as the format of choice for the scourge of flashing and blinking advertisements.

Bitt, this has nothing to do with the Pre and everything to do with Flash. It's Adobe's mess now, but the fault is with Macromedia.

Apart from web-based gaming, Flash really has no purpose. That's a pretty extreme comment, but it's the hyper-extension of the blink HTML tag to put it another way. Flash based games may somewhat damage the marketplaces being established by Apple and other vendors as well. I'd also not like to see Adobe get a free pass bypassing Apple's SDK while others may continue to be locked out (no interpreters allowed for anyone else).

There are a lot of important things missing from the iPhone and other mobile operating systems and browsers. Flash isn't one of those things. I'll usually see blog sites like Engadget or Gizmodo cry for Flash because frankly they have to always cry for something. But I've never seen any of them mention any solid reason for needing it - perhaps by mentioning some important sites that absolutely require it. I'd put in a vote to have those sites re-implemented with web standards, of which flash is most certainly not.

Anyway, I'd just rather not see otherwise decent devices polluted by Flash.