Flash while it is indeed a piece of garbage, has done a lot for the internet, there are many places of the internet that are flash dependent.
Some companies are still using flash in their internal systems, how do you justify breaking something that works for so many people?
Now think of IE6 deprecation.
This is necessary because its the only way to progress forward.
The fact this is a price Chrome is willing to pay indicates just how dead Flash is, and how much browser vendors are willing to kill it.
The sad reality is, there are are many companies that depend on flash for their corporate software. We all hear horror stories where IE6 has to be supported.
While I whole heartedly agree flash is something I would avoid like the plague it is not the reality for many companies. Think about it, at one point we all though flash was the cool new thing, but now almost everyone we know hates it. But if you force thousands of companies to replace their software just becuase another company does not want to support an ancient technology, it should ring alarm bells for us all. It would cost billions of dollars in upgrades if we consider all the companies that would be effected.
Google has to be put on the spotlight when they make changes such as these that would effect many people they have to give a good reason other-than, "oh its old, has many security bugs."
Google has to stop forcing everyone to conform to what they think is a best practice. They need to go through the proper channels, they need to get people like the etf, w3c and take these actions in a democratic way.
Google is slowly moving away from what made many of us love them, "Don't be evil" google was our hero in a time we had to put up with companies like Microsoft. It makes me incredibly mad to see a company I loved turn in to the companies they replaced.
The solution to those in the aggregate is not "Maintain IE6 backwards-compatibility forever." The challenge associated with that is why they're horror stories. But that's the opposite of what you're describing here; IE6 being supported ad-nauseum was necessary because MS had a bunch of non-compatible proprietary features in IE6 that didn't match to web standards. Google is trying to move out of supporting a non-web-standards architecture.
I'm confused about what aspect of minimizing the attack vector on a standard user's computer fails to meet "Don't be evil" as a motto. Is it the part where minimizing the attack vector for people who don't have a need for Flash collides badly with the needs of people who do have a need for Flash? People who still have a need for Flash have alternate user agents available to them; they don't need Chrome.
I'm sorry this change means you're going to have to account for your enterprise's reliance on Flash. I have friends who had to maintain code backwards-compatibility to pre-generics versions of Java. Enterprises gonna enterprise; we should neither hang the cutting edge nor the common person use-case on the relative lethargy of large companies.