...frankly the notion that people should deliberately tune out any information that they haven't actively sought out for themselves is kinda absurd.
The "We are inundated with information we don't care about to the point that we can't ignore it" argument is a good one. That said, I wouldn't say the iPad is precisely analogous to Tiger Woods's sex life, as it has the potential to affect the production and consumption of media in the long term, which is something that might be relevant to our lives over the course of the next decade or so. Whether we buy the thing or not.
Moving on:
Youtube can be made to work without Flash. The Amiga web browser Origyn manages to let Youtube work without a native Flash plugin. It just looks for the FLV and displays it in the Flash applet's place using the browser's own player interface.
Well yes, but the browser still has to be designed to play Flash-format video files. Which Safari/Webkit is not.
Apple creating its own Flash player isn't really what this is about -- they're trying to leverage built-in video options in HTML 5. Which I'm actually all for, because Flash honestly IS a bloated, unstable mess that we unfortunately find ourselves relying on pretty much every day.