[ugh]

They are. And they don’t even need the demos to tell us that (they admittedly could have handled the demos better, I just don’t think it’s a big deal). Safari is a great browser, Webkit is a kick ass render engine, you can do cool stuff with it on the iPhone and iPad and all that cool stuff will (nearly always) also work on any other (say, Android) modern mobile OS. Or nearly every modern browser.

Moreover, if you don’t like the Safari UI you can check out one of several Webkit browsers (most notably Chrome).

If you could do everything with emerging web standards that you can now do with Flash this wouldn’t even be a contest. The emerging standards would win hands down. You admittedly can’t (yet?) but it really does look as though the scenarios where you need to use Flash are getting scarcer by the day.

Apple might be the bad guys with respect to the App Store, they are the good guys as far as browser development is concerned.

[Yaggo]

I can fully understand why Apple promotes Safari. The demos are a showcase of bleeding edge CSS, namely 3D transitions, currently implemented only by Safari. No doubt other browsers will implement them too. See http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-3d-transforms/

Also, being hardware accelerated on OS X, Safari renders 2D/3D transitions at superior framerate compared to Chrome (don't even mention Firefox). The difference is huge. Apple's message is "Hey look, we made a great (open source) rendering engine and want show you what can be done in HTML/CSS when things are properly implemented. Check this out as a reference implementation and feel free to implement it in your browser."

[Yes, the 2D/3D HW accelerated rendering uses Apple's proprietary frameworks and is not open sourced, AFAIK.]