I'm guessing your experience with Flash on the desktop is on Windows? I've never had significant problems with it there. On the other hand, my experience is that on a Mac (or worse, Linux), Flash is slow, crash-prone, a major CPU and RAM hog, tends to steal keyboard and/or mouse focus in weird ways when you least expect it, and just generally does not provide a very nice user experience.

This has nothing to do with Apple "crippling" Flash or anything like that either; if anything, Adobe has been improving the Mac version of Flash since before Apple started publicly ragging on it. They've still got quite a ways to go though.