"1) Just to take an example, no desktop GUI, much less a pure web toolkit does image manipulation, drawing, filters and geometry at pixel-accuracy like Flash does, at such small footprint, speed, and pleasant language. It's just 1 part of Flash."

Exactly, people talk about "flash being slow", but the competence is even slower when they try to make what flash does well(drawing vector shapes videos).

E.g when the OSS community tried to make animated svg or flash videos, they discovered their performance was simply awful compared to flash(the two guys that created it were not idiots after all).

MS tried with silverlight not to do difficult things with vectors like flash does, and use hardware acceleration at the maximum level so nobody notice how poor their performance is. The same strategy of metro on win7 of "not trying to do what computers are not good for(translation: our employees don't know/don't want to do the hard work it takes to compete with flash, as computers improve we try to make the minimum effort, and use marketing to compete) "