Yeah, you could argue this... and then we could just point out that Jobs & co are right, and Flash has been a battery hog since the dawn of time. This is a reason why the iPhone can be so performant; you're arguing that it's perfectly acceptable to degrade the otherwise shockingly good performance of a mobile device when it can be avoided entirely.
Flash needs to stay out of this argument, as at the end of the day it's still a real ethical question - how much CPU are you realistically allowed to take and continually use from a user visiting your page?
