Why is there always SOOO much misinformation whenever Android is mentioned.
First of all, you CANNOT go to the market in Android and install 10.1 for the Xoom, it wont work. Its not optimized for the Tegra2 and will not install.
Second, flash does NOT reduce your battery life. Its no different than HTML5. If you watched a flash video and an HTML5 video you would lose the same amount of battery. Anyone repeating this point has no idea what they are talking about and is just repeating a line from Apple. The only reason that Flash would reduce your battery life is that you actually see the video and can play it while the person without flash cannot. So obviously if one users plays and streams a video of whatever length, it will use more battery than someone who does not.
Third, flash is installed out of the box on nearly all Android devices. The reason its not on the Xoom is that the Tegra 2 optimized version isn't out yet. They rushed the Xoom to compete with the iPad2 for some reason. Makes no sense. That is the root of most of the issues right now, no apps, no flash, no sd card support, all because they rushed it out as soon as possible. The Honeycomb SDK for example was released the DAY before the Xoom launched, so obviously there wasn't going to be any apps. Terrible move on Motorola's part.