Most people install flash anyway, regardless of whether or not it's preinstalled. Ideally, everyone could just kill flash and that would be awesome, but a huge amount of content is already made in flash and there are a few areas where standards are not implemented consistently or at all (eg. the Device API for accessing webcams and microphones, though a version of Android does support that and the ConnectionPeer interface for peer-to-peer connections). Flash isn't used exclusively for video.
When it's 2028 and all the h.264 patents finally expire, it would be great if Google were to add h.264 back to the chrome browser, but of course, the browser landscape would probably be so vastly different that it would be hardly relevant.
YouTube is reencoding the videos in WebM. But it's doubtful that the h.264 videos will be removed because of Apple's stubbornness in only supporting a single format (However, I'm quite sure Safari plays whatever videos are supported by the pluggable QuickTime engine, so once someone makes a QT plugin that adds WebM, it'll play in Safari. The same way IE9 implements video codecs).
Gruber only lists 4 or so companies that use H.264 with <video>. There probably aren't too many more that exclusively use h.264 with <video>. Certainly far less than the number of people who use flash video.
When it's 2028 and all the h.264 patents finally expire, it would be great if Google were to add h.264 back to the chrome browser, but of course, the browser landscape would probably be so vastly different that it would be hardly relevant.
YouTube is reencoding the videos in WebM. But it's doubtful that the h.264 videos will be removed because of Apple's stubbornness in only supporting a single format (However, I'm quite sure Safari plays whatever videos are supported by the pluggable QuickTime engine, so once someone makes a QT plugin that adds WebM, it'll play in Safari. The same way IE9 implements video codecs).
Gruber only lists 4 or so companies that use H.264 with <video>. There probably aren't too many more that exclusively use h.264 with <video>. Certainly far less than the number of people who use flash video.