From the article: "When Apple first launched the iPhone in 2007, had there been a great, lightweight version of Flash for mobile devices, .... It was no sure thing that this device would succeed at the time, and giving it every chance to (by including something like Flash) would have made sense. But there was no version of Flash ready that would run on the device (presumably without massive performance/battery hits)."

There were the obvious performance problems, which caused apple not to support flash in iphone.

They sure have a "killer" product(which has worked for them this far), but html5 support by websites is increasing everyday. This is probably because not only it's natively supported and doesn't need a external plugin to run, but overall experience is much better than flash itself.

I think there is not much that adobe can do now to stop this but get along and write great tools for html5 itself.