I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that it us using Flash - a HTML5/JS demo of the same app would be equally unimpressive (although I think peopl

I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that it us using Flash - a HTML5/JS demo of the same app would be equally unimpressive (although I think people generally have lower expectations when it comes to HTML/JS apps vs supposedly 'native' apps). The entire point is that it's not the holy grail of cross platform development because in a real world application you would never be able to truly build-once and and deploy everywhere. Hell, if you've ever tried to deploy a Flash app across Windows/OS X/Linux you'll come across slight differences between those platforms (Windows is generally the best supported/least buggy, with OS X and Linux being second and third class citizens, respectively.) I would rather have seen a demo where they took the same application logic (which admittedly for Reversi is very limited), and hooked it up to different versions of the user interface, demonstrating how much code you could reuse in a cross-platform manner while presenting native interfaces designed for each type of device.