The counter to that is pretty obvious, because if you remember Jobs also said "no native apps on iPhones", and then in a few months... poof! an app store.
Flash was pretty much dead anyway, and the web platform had advanced enough to mostly replace it at that point. That wasn't true for native apps.
If you want to make a standard, it has to let people do the things they want to do. Otherwise, people will just use a different (or no) standard.
I'm not really getting into the standards thing here--just throwing some ammo to the underdog.
My only point is that there are only a handful of companies with the cash, the talent, and the inclination to tackle these things, and most of them are near if not total monopolies, so as long as what they put out there isn't a blatant kick-in-the-nuts, most of us will just accept it.
iPhone was a compelling product, didn't have flash, everyone migrated to Javascript ASAP. Google is practically a monopoly, and when webmaster tools tells people to jump, watch everyone piss away a weekend to add microformats and shave 5% off of a few 40k images.
Flash was pretty much dead anyway, and the web platform had advanced enough to mostly replace it at that point. That wasn't true for native apps.
If you want to make a standard, it has to let people do the things they want to do. Otherwise, people will just use a different (or no) standard.