Apple's stance on Flash does hurt users. But its stance on vodeo? Hardly. They chose an established, proven format that has hardware decoding capabilities. That means they could include it cheaply, and in a way that doesn't drain battery like a software decoder would.
Apple's stance on Flash hurts users _now_. But, I still envy my future self living in a world where Flash is dead. The same can be said about Google hurting users _now_. Pushing content producers towards an open and maintainable format has obvious long term advantages.
That's exactly my view, both moves are good to me. HTML5 video is still young and barely used currently, it's the time to try to shape how it will be used. If you wait 5 years, h264 will be impossible to displace and everyone will have to get software with a license, hurting all of us even more.
But again, H264 is not HTML5 video... H264 is a video codec that just happens to be used with the video tag on Mobile Safari and IE9. It's also how a majority of YouTube's videos are encoded currently, as well as many many other video uplod sites.
It's also the codec used on the Xbox360, the PSP, the PS3, and other pes of consumer electronics. It turns out that to reach the largest audience of consumer electronic devices and computer, H264 happens to be the best choice.
Video production workflows let content producers save as h264 videos.
The adult industry is using h264 videos on their web sites to serve their content to portable "more personal" devices.
Apple's stance is "why should we ship a product with known security holes out of the box and take the heat for it?"
Any user can install Flash. Apple is not depriving the user of anything.
If Google pulls the plug on H.264 on YouTube, they are depriving a lot of users of access. Mobile users (not just iOS users). Wii Users. Blu-Ray players/Web Top boxes.
Will it all eventually get straightened out? Yes, one way or another. But the sudden shift in strategy seems like Google isn't going to care one way or another to who they put out to pasture in order to establish a new de facto standard. It's very 1990s-era Microsoft of them.
Apple didn't previously have Flash support in iOS and then remove it... taking something working out for ideological reasons is much worse than never adding something in for ideological reasons in my book.
Apple could support flash for nothing... Adobe has tried to do it for them, with both direct flash support and this conversion tool. Apple is making a purely idealogical decision.
