While the iPhone is many things to many people, the lack of Flash support has been criticized wildly since day one. Now, with the dawn of the iPad only weeks away, these criticisms are one again coming to the forefront. The team at Apple Insider have recently dissected this argument from every angle and produced a lengthy text of their findings. Much to our surprise, they felt the lack of Flash support didn’t hurt the iPhone and iPad nearly as much as it hurts Flash.

“The iPhone’s lack of support for Flash does not appear to have had any impact on its popularity, but clearly has played a significant role in devaluing the importance of Flash in mobile devices, even if other platforms are enthusiastically embracing Flash. At the same time, if developers on other platforms use Flash to reach those mobile audiences, they’ll being doing that instead of creating native software for Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and so on. That will also benefit Apple, because it will keep its iPhone App Store well ahead of rivals.”