Looks rather interesting... I'll have to try to get somebody with an iPad to get it, and then try it out... Before Apple decides to curb-stomp it ;)

To say that other way, would MS take 70% of retail price of a sale that would not have otherwise happened? Hell yes, I don't think that would be a problem for MS. No sales channel is free, and I think retailer cut generally (not sure about software sales) is pretty commonly around that 30% anyway.

I was thinking of a case like using or editing online Excel workbook with macros. Excel workbook can essentially be an application in itself, and proper Office app will need to be able to run this kind of "applications".

UI stutter isn't flash problem, but long app start time, or app UI having nothing to display yet because hasn't loaded yet certainly can be a flash issue. Relatively slow flash might actually reduce cases of UI stutter, since CPU isn't so busy processing data... ;)

Well, fully functional and implemented HTML5 standard, combined with good HTML5 tools, will make dedicated web service apps less useful, to the point of them becoming irrelevant. Why develop and maintain an app for 3+ mobile platforms, if you can make a single touch-optimized web interface which will work equally well on any mobile device with minimal platfrom-dependent tweaking?

That'll hurt Apple's app store revenue. Apple will fight that. Wether they fight it with dirty "monopolistic" practices like "extend&extinguish" standards, or just by marketing and trying to create an experience HTML5 can't match, or something in between, like trying to stall HTML5 standardization of certain future technologies while applying the same technologies heavily on iOS native apps, that remains to be seen.

I meant the combination of allowing scripting and allowing online data, apart from using Apple-provided HTML engine.

(And I'm sure Apple has spent some effort trying to figure out how to meaningfully support HTML5 without actually allowing HTML5 online applications from outside it's "garden walls", but I'm pretty sure they haven't found a way, or have they?)

Well, if you have a simplish problem where you need to do some calculations on some data, what would be a better solution than whipping out an Excel (or equivalent) sheet with the data and the calculations?

Well, unless you mean something along the lines of "if Excel is the right solution, then Google Docs spreadsheet is even more right solution", then I can't really argue for common desktop use case. In mobile case (like Android + Google Docs vs. WP7 + it's office apps), I haven't tried so I don't know, but I suspect MS solution will give superior user experience in that case.

Office supports all kinds of scripting. Would Apple allow apps with such scripting support on it's app store? Would Apple allow the iDevice Office version access MS online services? Unless they've changed pretty recently, I'm under impression that anything like that is a big no-no with Apple, apps which even hint at having that kind of functionality simply rejected.

If Apple would not make exception with MS, then the iDevice MS Office would be seriously crippled, so much so that MS might be right in deciding it does not want to do that. MS is trying to develop office into a broad online offering, and I could see how Apple would not accept that on their devices.

Of course there's a different controversy of just how much scripting should office application documents support in the first place, but I'll not get into that here...

Yeah, good old Mercator. Distorting world view of "Westerners" since 16th century, even if it has some nice properties, which make it favourite choice of services like Google Maps even today.

But I hope, perhaps in vain, that anybody reading /. has at least vague understanding of the subject, considering how relevant it is today, with all the online maps around.

That's not really relevant to flash memory performance, hardware acceleration is just what puts the bottleneck squarely at flash throughput. If you have N x the pixels on screen, you'll need N x throughput for flash memory, or the app will either load slower, or it will not take advantage of the resolution and needs to resort to real time scaling (which is ok, but far cry from proper "photoshop" scaling quality). Another thing is increase in camera megapixels, and also increase in acceptable thumbnail sizes, due to increased screen resolution. Hardware acceleration only starts to help once image data is in RAM.