It was also a pretty shitty user experience, forcing inflexible web-optimized flash into the phone form factor.
Those problems could've been overcome, but it's definitely not like Flash on day 1 would've been good for any users.
Take that as a data point that Flash on day 1 would have been good at least for one user. :)
Apple's decision probably still benefited the ecosystem as a whole because it drove the adoption of flash replacements.
And yeah: so imagine how bad it would've been then, if it still sucked that bad on 2010 smartphones.
If anything, it was much crappier, without 4 years of any kind of optimization for mobile use.
How would they get it running on a 2007 era iPhone that had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB RAM?
(Reminds me of the iOS 1.0 jokes that Nokias run iOS apps faster, which was true - back when all "apps" were HTML boondoggles)