@Hanratty - If you think the day is coming when a huge corporation orders 10k of these with their own app pre-installed...you're just dreaming. Not least because no corporation has a use for its workers to be watching YouTube between punching in orders. The iPad may be a lot of things to a lot of people, but it is definitely not a wise business decision from 30,000 feet.

@Gerbick - The "something" missing for me is the ability to install Apache, PHP and Eclipse, crack some knuckles, code something, launch an FTP program, open a terminal, or generally do something "useful". All this device does is play movies, music and games, and show magazine articles. When I start doing any of those things, I know I've finished my work for the day; I turn off my computer and go out to have a life, instead of an iLife. My job is to manipulate those zombies through design and UI. I wouldn't buy an iphone or an ipad because I don't want to turn into one of them. (My phone is a $20 Nokia basic w/o a camera I picked up in Vietnam).

@jAQUAN - There are custom apps, and in-house custom apps. I don't actually care about putting out an iphone app with Flash for general use in the store. I would really like to see Flash run on an iphone because existing private Flash apps I've built for clients could be used on that platform.

In the last 4 years, I've billed around $250k for custom business apps written in Flash/Flex, that operate on intranets, as separate from websites or anything else I've built. There were only two reasons for writing the apps that way. Firstly, they had to have a high level of GUI interaction that isn't possible with AJAX alone. Stuff like secure PDF readers, private filesystems, and enormous project management and color-coded reservations calendars, FLV preview and splicing systems that work across scalable architectures, etc. Secondly, they had to be accessible on any platform, because for the most part my clients are franchisors who can't dictate to franchisees what computers they install in their offices, or otherwise need tools to make it profitable and easy to manage a distributed workforce performing specific technical tasks.

Taken together, it was exactly Flash's combination of flexibility and platform independence that made it worthwhile for clients to develop custom in-house apps for their businesses with it. While it's not impossible to imagine a client asking for a custom iphone app for internal use under certain circumstances, platform specificity often defeats the purpose of developing a custom solution at all versus using one off the shelf.