By now we all know that the Apple iPad will go down in history as the most revolutionary device since the opposable thumb, and the most tin-eared product name since Dr. Crapper’s brainchild.

The naming problem can be overcome if the tablet gets enough lift among the public. (Who would have given odds that everyone would want a Wii?) But the revolutionary promise could come true. Consumers are buying portability in their electronics. Recent forecasts from the Consumer Electronics Association predict that this year’s hot categories will be wireless handsets and especially smart phones (52 million to be sold globally in 2010) and, in the PC category, lightweight, stripped down netbooks (30 million units to be sold this year.)

Apple is betting that there’s a lasting consumer market for a device that’s positioned between the mobile handset and the laptop computer. (And other makers like Dell, Acer and Lenovo are making the same bet.) Of course, it remains to be seen if they’ve gotten the price points right: $500 for the standard showroom model (9.7-inch screen, WiFi connectivity and 16GB storage) in March and about $850 for the “rally sport” package (same screen, faster 3G networking, 64GB storage) later this year.

“Netbooks aren’t better at anything,” CEO Steve Jobs said in taking the wraps off the iPad. “They are slow, they have low-quality displays and run PC software. [IPAd] is so much more intimate than a laptop, and so much more capable than a smartphone with this gorgeous large display.”

http://www.youtube.com/v/RGPdv7dr_cI

So what impact will the arrival of this new device—and its all-but-inevitable clones—have on marketers’ messaging strategies?

In the short term, it might make online marketing tougher. The best reports suggest that the iPad does not now display either Flash animation or ActiveX—two platforms that make a lot of Web features, including display ads, widgets and games more engaging by adding motion and interactivity. But the upshot for marketers might well be that their ads either won’t function properly—or even show up—on a Web page viewed on an iPad.

Commentators are divided on whether this is a conscious strategy from Apple or simply the by-product of rushing to get the product out in time for the company’s traditional January unveiling. The fact that Flash comes from Adobe and ActiveX from Microsoft hasn’t been lost on a number of bloggers, who charge Apple with trying to undercut rival software makers.

While neither Apple nor Adobe has officially commented on whether the iPad’s Flash omission is an expedient shortcut or a calculated death blow, an Adobe Flash group blog did make mention of the issue after the iPad unveiling. “Without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of Web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the Web,” Adrian Ludwig wrote. “If I want to use the iPad to connect to Disney, Hulu, Miniclip, Farmville, ESPN, Kongregate or JibJab—not to mention the millions of other sites on the Web—I’ll be out of luck.”

JibJab, folks: the people now powering OfficeMax’s “Elf Yourself” campaigns. How will iPad users get to strut their pointy-shoed stuff next Christmas?

Apple hasn’t responded to questions about the non-support for Flash—except to remove a photo from an official iPad gallery of the device apparently loading some Flash content from the New York Times Web site. The move may have been a response to a public complaint by a user to the FTC that Apple was engaging in false advertising by suggesting that iPad users could access that kind of Flash-based content.

CEO Steve Jobs’ iPad presentation also included a Flash-failure moment, as noted by the independent blog AppleInsider. (Check out the empty space on the NYT Web page Jobs is looking at at 1:19 of the video clip above.)

Marketers often roll up their eyes at these platform discussions, but they shouldn’t. These techie questions have real ROAS significance as consumers’ media consumption becomes increasingly digital. If you want clickthroughs, you have to pay attention to what’s getting clicked. Or not clicked, in the case of Flash content on the iPad.

The prospect of being shut out of a hot new device definitely worries Randall Rothenberg, chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade group, who posted in his “I, a Bee” blog mid-January that “a company’s opportunity to create, sell and use advertising effectively and profitably will depend on its ability to deliver it seamlessly across multiple devices.”

“The creative agencies on the IAB Agency Advisory Board have said categorically that their single greatest obstacle to advertising effectiveness and growth is their inability to deliver the same rich-media ads to tens of millions of households across multiple site because, as they put it, ‘the rich media toolkit differs too much from site to site,’ Rothenberg writes. “The Apple iPad’s lack of Adobe Flash—a core component of much interactive display advertising—only serves to underscore how splintered the advertising economy could become.”

And he offers this advice to device manufacturers: “Beat your brains out competitively, but don’t subvert the advertising economy.”

Of course, advertisers who rely on Flash have already been closed off from another crazy-popular device: the iPhone, which doesn’t run Flash content either. The difference is that in mobile, nobody expects too much from display ads (yet!), especially compared to apps; and publishers have been willing to optimize their content for iPhone display. So Flash has not really been missed there.

But leaving Flash support off a device that’s designed to access the Web directly just like a laptop—that’s a much bigger problem for advertisers.

The problem is made more complex by the fact that there’s a good reason to move from a proprietary standard for presenting multimedia content. A new Web presentation standard on the horizon, HTML5, promises to do what Flash and other company-owned platforms do now—only better, offering one unified industry standard for implementing multimedia. That could be good for everyone, marketers included, if it made content development faster, easier and cheaper. Google’s Chrome browser and the latest version of Mozilla’s Firefox already support part of the HTML5 standard. So is Apple engaging in competitive protectionism by not integrating the plug-ins from rivals or pointing to an open-standards future?

Web commentary heavyweight Robert Scoble points out that the Firefox browser used to have a lot of broken links due to missing Flash support too, but that its widening adoption forced developers to “get on board with the standards-based Web” and start building sites and content that could display on browsers other than Internet Explorer.

Meanwhile analyst John Gruber points out that Adobe is only able to claim 99% market penetration for Flash because its survey methods only count PCs, and not the wider range of devices—from game consoles to Internet TVs and smartphones like the iPhone and the Blackberry—that people now use habitually to get to the Web.

“Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about,” Gruber writes. “That’s no longer true, and Adobe’s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells.”

Is Apple a forward-thinking Web company trying to move away from proprietary standards, or simply using its market power to undercut a business competitor? And as a marketer, will you wait to see if new devices like the iPad come around to Flash? Or will you proactively go out and instruct your Web team to find a way to work with HTML5 or some of the other new standards—as long as it gets you in front of the broad audience you want? I’d really like to hear from you.