That power-consuming proprietary product that will be superseded by HTML 5? Websites relying on Flash aren't powered by them but drained by them.

Remember the target audience for the ipad is idiots. Idiots don't care about technical arguments like that, however true they may be. Idiots want to surf youporn and play flash games on the web. Once they realize that their favorite sites don't work anymore, they won't be happy.

and experience the magic of using it...

I guess you should ask them again once they have used the ipad to type in twenty email messages or blog comments.

That's indeed one of the goals of the Wikimedia foundation, it's in their charter. They are a 100% open source shop. After all, it's a "free encyclopedia", and the word "free" has many senses, all of which apply here.

Maybe not innately evil, but certainly innately amoral. By law, a corporation may only perform actions that directly or indirectly increase profits. It cannot do things just because they are "right" or "good", it must always maximize profits, using all legally available means. Otherwise the shareholders can sue.

Let's not forget that Darwin himself believed in Lamarckism; genetics wasn't known at the time.

The whole phenomenon isn't that new; it's called epigenetics and is transmitted most likely by the methylation pattern of the DNA, histone modification, and RNA interference. It's not stable and doesn't last beyond a few generations though, so it won't give a new mechanism for natural selection.