In other words, their failure to optimise in the past caused CPU usage to be twice what it could have and should have been. This is incontrovertible.

Not sure how many mobile devices you have had over the years, but I can't personally think of a single application or name a single developer until iPhone came out. Maybe you can, and based upon your math, who is beating iPhone these days? Nokia? Not only is iPhone spectacularly more profitable than them, Nokia's stock is down 35% since iPhone was first announced whereas Apple's is up 105% so the market doesn't see it that way.

As to the fundamental proposition you put forth that Flash's problems are somehow Apple's fault, I'd say according to who? Adobe? Have they even gone on record saying that?

Regardless, the market is the ultimate arbiter of these things. If the masses considered lack of Flash a showstopper, we'd be hearing about it, or more fundamentally, we'd be seeing it in terms of lost sales and lost momentum for Apple.

It's just not happening. Now, maybe you are in the conspiracy bucket that Apple is just a marketing machine, and that consumers are lemmings, but follow their numbers quarter after quarter, product by product through a brutal recession, and I'd say the hard data speaks pretty clearly.

Relative to who “invented” what, I would say this. Most everything in tech is derivative of ideas that came before it. There is very little split the atom, totally new.

The hard part is making the piece parts work as a cohesive whole in a manner that satisfies customers, partners and investors.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find many people that consider the mobile business less interesting since iPhone rolled out.

Further html5 will not be available as a STANDARD for at least two if not three more years – in which time people will realise that platforms such as Maemo 5 – if you dont know what this is then stop posting – will have destroyed iPhone.
Flash is geared to running on the GPU – therefore all your points regarding hardware are mute – flash 10.1 runs on HARDWARE.
Flash is significantly more than a video player – and focusing on this only shows your incredibly limited understanding of technology and the web. It is by far and away the most powerful tool for dynamic develooment – cabale of interacting and delivering its own sockets (flash 10), its own peer 2 peer networking and peer clouding (flash 10), and much, MUCH more which html5 can not do.
In fact to deliver even a fraction of what flash is capable of HTML5 has to interact with a plethora of server side tehcnologies, running on WHO knows what server, into WHO KNOWS what client, running on WHO KNOWS what OS – so in other words to work in html5 equivalent of flash you have to consider linux, IIS, mac, windows, palm, winos, maemo, Firefox, safari, IE, Javascript, ASP, Java, PHP – etc, etc, etc, etc or SIMPLY USE FLASH FOR EVERYTHING !!! Which one has more BUGS ?
Finaly flash is becoming ubiquitous across all platforms and is coming to television – should we put html on the TV – no because it would be MORONIC. It is delivering game consoles, driving super tankers, oil rig readouts, in car navs, DVD menus, and of course desktop, mobile – ONE format.

There is simply no comparison between html5 and flash – any argument what so ever is quite frankly ridiculous.

Plenty question Apple's business policies and politics, but not their platform prowess.