Apple doesn't seem to care much about the hordes of people saying "iPhone sucks!" due to the poor quality of the AT&T network. Or... maybe it's not just AT&T's fault. I have two friends who both just recently got iPhones, both of whom had other phones on AT&T before this. Both of them now have constant call quality issues, call drops, etc. This is in San Francisco, hardly a backwater burb. Now their earlier experience with much cheaper cell phones on the same network in the same places might almost lead one to believe it's an iPhone hardware problem (incidentally one has a 3G and one a 3GS).
So if Apple cares so much about negative effects on their product perception from 3rd parties, it might be a good idea to get a different network partner. It might also be a good idea to design a cell phone antenna that works. But, as we all know, their current lock-in makes them a nice pile of cash, and iterative product upgrade cycles do too, so it's in their best interest to fix neither of these issues right away.
From this we can conclude: If there was money in having Flash on their platform, they would do it. Let's not dance around the issue here and pretend it's about "user experience" and "reputation", etc. This is about money, plain and simple.
- Oshyan