Great post, John Gruber: http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/practical_vs_idealistic
But you’re wrong about one thing . . .
These services continue to ignore devices and clients that support neither straight H.264 nor Flash Player (e.g. Firefox running on Ubuntu).
Adobe actually creates a version of Flash Player for Linux, which includes Ubuntu. Video providers such as Netflix, Amazon, Major League Baseball, etc. don’t provide content to Linux users because they either don’t think there are enough users to make it worth the trouble or they have concerns about the effectiveness of their DRM on the Linux platform. Netflix specifically created their player, inexplicably, with Silverlight rather than Flash.