"Flash Works On Touch-Based Devices"
It's not so much a matter of running it, it's an interface implementation problem.
Think of all the flash based games you've played in the past. Think of how you move the mouse around, and for example, a hand or a crosshairs moves, or maybe your guy starts waking toward where you have the arrow now. Or you have to swing the mouse around between targets.
AND then at some point of course you have to click the mouse.
These two operations can be independent because Flash has "mousehover". It means the app can tell where you've moved the mouse to, before you click it. This is a very handy control feature, and not surprisingly, and to no fault of the devs, they use it. A lot. Almost 100% of the time.
Problem. Touch interfaces don't currently have any way to indicate you are say, sweeping your finger across the surface without clicking. As far as the touch interface is concerned, your "mouse button is down" the entire time. This is the primary problem. There's no way to move the pointer on a touch surface without it interpreting a click down. The only way around this is to require the user to do some other additional interaction, like a quick release and tap down. This is something of a hack, but it will suffice for many of the games. BUT it's likely to require a recode of the app to smoothly support.
Second problem, much less frequently noticed. Your finger is in the way. It's often very important to get a very precise position in those games, AND you often need to see when the pointer changes colors, patterns, etc, indicates you're over the thing you can click on etc etc. On a touch interface, your finger is covering the pointer. It doesn't need you to see the pointer because you can't hover anyway. So if you fix hover, you have this new problem. This can also be hacked around by feeding such apps false touch information, such as placing the input 1/4" up from the actual finger location. This would either require a switch on the device or modifying the app.
There are other issues that are also less obvious. A few games have a very real need to intercept when you sweep your cursor over certain things. They could be walls or enemies or whatever. Basically pointer-to-object collision detection. For example, navigate your man through a maze. You can't cheat them because your pointer is always on the screen, and you can't move from A to C without crossing B. Except if you can lift your finger off the touch screen. So this breaks some game dynamics. (your man could teleport to the exit) This too could be hacked around, we could say that if you lift your finger and drop it somewhere else, the ipod feeds a fast hover sweep from A to C, crossing B, and causing whatever that may cause to happen.
So... yes, it can be done, but there are several severe limitations you have to work around. It could be done, and we may yet see it happen, especially if touch interfaces continue to increase in popularity. But these problems cannot be dismissed or ignored. They are legitimate, serious problems to be addressed.
