Opinions varied widely on that - the Flash experience on mobile was horrible enough that it works equally well as an argument that “the web” and Flash were substantially not the same.

It was definitely horrible, but given how pervasive Flash was on the web then, I think a more reasonable takeaway is to say that no mobile device had first-class browser support until HTML5 <video> became prevalent. To me, "first class" implies "I can visit any popular website and expect it to work", which was decidedly not the case for iPhone at introduction.