I purchased an iPad a few months back and have been using it frequently since then - mostly for software development but also for general web browsing. The lack of Flash is really an issue as far as I can see.
The problems manifest themselves in some obvious and some not so obvious ways.
Obviously you cannot access any sort of Flash directly - which is a pain but at least you know where you stand.
The more difficult issues arise when there is some Flash element embedded in a page that is required for the page to work. For example, a login page. Since there is no way to tell that there is Flash involved you have to compare your actions against a browser with Flash - not very convenient.
Another problem is simply blank portions of a web pages. No explanation, no errors like "This page has Flash and I cannot display it." Again you are never sure what is really wrong until you do some forensic evaluation against a browser that supports Flash.
For a casual user this is not really a problem. But if you intend to use the iOS device for something more serious it can become an issue. For example, I cannot write this blog from the iPad because the Google tools for creating posts requires it (well, I can write in HTML with the Google tool but that's so much of a pain I consider it not being able to post).
From the software developer perspective its less clear what the issues with Flash are. Clearly the iOS software has some form of "limited memory". What this means exactly is not so clear. iOS seems to be a unix-style OS under the hood directly related to Mac OS X in that it supports a lot of the same features, Frameworks, classes, technologies (networking, file system, etc.), and so on.
The Darwin unix on which its based clearly does not have this limit as part of its nature. However, Apple has done some things curtail its ability to support large applications. (The memory limit on the graphics side is a separate issue.) There seems to be 128 Mb associated with programs of which about 30 Mb is used for running programs.
My guess is that other than very specific circumstances the iOS processors are very slow - particularly with things like swapping memory out to the flash memory used for storing things like music and so forth. Hence the limits. But the limits also keep down the costs and the iPad is very cheap compared to the other tablets out there.
Its not hard to believe that Flash does not (cannot?) respect these limits.
Adobe has created a new tool, called Wallaby, to convert Flash to HTML5-based objects. However, its not clear that this is a good or long term solution. Not everything converts and some things that are converted are converted to unlike HTML5 object.
I don't see this as a solution long term.
Apparently Flash scripts are so ugly and convoluted that no technology accessible to Adobe is able to resolve them. This is hard to believe as well - all Mac OSX devices have virtual machines for running the old G5-based processor executables.
Why can't Flash run in a "black box" or on a "virtual machine" in iOS?
Who knows...
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