Yes, Flash works pretty well. There's a new site called YouTube based on it that I hear is starting to take off. And someone mentioned something called Hulu I've been meaning to check out. Although, you're argument that they chose Flash over Real, Windows Media and Quicktime because they wanted to go with something that doesn't work is probably valid.

The primary reason an iPad has long battery life is that it's a big cell phone rather than a small PC. Room for more mAH batteries and low-voltage, low-draw hardware. The early netbooks exploited this design advantage for big battery numbers, although progress in that space seems to have more or less stopped. Although, the review I read mentioned "nearly 6 hours" of use out of an iPad which is about on par with an Asus netbook.

H.264 video code, regardless of which company implements it, is pretty much the same. Nice engineering, no magic. Any platform can provide hardware-accelerated video, and Windows (at least 7) does it, too.

Flash is, for what it does, very CPU efficient, mostly to target lower-end machines. People attempting to achieve the same results with HTML and Javascript? Unknown, but not likely to be better. Flash, as a cross-platform technology has been good for the Mac because it's meant developers haven't need to go with a Windows-specific technology for game-like UI. And people eat that stuff up. They vote with their feet.

The idea that Apple users don't want Flash is unsubstantiated. Nearly every reviewer, even the fanboys, grumbled about the lack of support. Phone and device developers are more disappointed. If Flash were on both iWhatever and Droid platforms, one could economically develop for both. Apple, with an early lead in the App market space doesn't want that. It would be too easy for people with successful iPhone apps to make them available for Droid. Another reason -- in the short term -- to use lawyers to prevent Adobe from offering up a tool that users and developers could accept or reject.

Remember when Apple kicked developers out of the App store for mentioning that they had a Droid version available? Well, I'm sure that helped battery life, too.