You people that claim you don't notice the lack of flash are full of it.
And if you have a laptop and an iPhone, guess what? Your iPad is overkill. If you just think it's cool, that's another story. But stop trying to act like the lack of flash isn't a big deal. Just about every car, boat, retail, and media site uses it.
As I said, Flash isn't a big deal for me. I use my iPad primarily for university, and almost all websites I need for that do not use Flash - my lectures are all available as PDFs, and all of the Journals I access through services such as JSTOR etc. offer articles as either PDFs or HTML. Most other websites that I access tend to be text based as well. So again, Flash isn't a big deal for me and I'm sure that I am not alone.
The only time I miss Flash is when it comes to Kongregate, but as has been mentioned before, Flash, and therefore Flash based games, are not configured for touch-interface devices, so it would be pretty useless even if the iPad had Flash. But this is the failing of Adobe, not Apple.
As for your last sentence - Fiat, Porsche, Audi and Mercedes Benz don't use much if any flash - heck Mercedes Benz even has an iPhone specific website that looks really good on an iPad. Seat, VW and BMW do use more, but it only comprises some elements of the websites. The absence of Flash actually makes the websites load faster, but it also doesn't stop me from getting all the information I need from the websites (pictures and text still load fine, just not the promotional videos). Additinally, my experience with media websites is that Flash is not that prevalent - only a few videos don't work on many of the websites, but this is of little concern as often these videos are accompanied by text. Additionally, many outlets offer iPad specific apps (e.g. BBC, Die Welt, WSJ etc) which are often better than using the web because you can just download content in the morning before leaving home.
Taking this into account I would therefore, in your position, refrain from using general statements such as "Just about every" as it infers that most websites fail to function without Flash, and this is obviously just not true. If you had instead used the term "many", then I wouldn't feel the need to point out the errors in your opinion.
Please do remember that the world is full of unique individuals who do not necessarily share your view of the world, so telling someone that they are "full of it" because they beg to differ is far from constructive. Additionally, your evaluation of the importance of Flash in the average internet experience is a fallacy of defective induction, unless you have some statistics to present that support your claims. This also goes for your claim that concurrant ownership of both a laptop and an iPhone make the iPad redundant.
