While firing up the troops during his surprise appearance at Apple’s quarterly conference call with financial analysts last week, CEO Steve Jobs was his outspoken best in trashing the competition.

Or, at the very least, providing a sorely needed reality check.

Sometimes, Jobs has to say absolutely nothing to push a few buttons. Take the quiet decision to deliver new Macs without Adobe Flash preloaded. You can’t imagine how many uninformed so-called tech scribes are bitching and moaning about how Apple is engaged in a vicious plot to kill Flash, or even Adobe for that matter.

Now we all know there’s no love lost between Apple and Adobe over lots of issues, and Flash is only the tip of the iceberg. Apple is surely not pleased when Adobe builds Windows-only apps, or seems to pay only lip service to the best programming features of the Mac platform. With Flash, however, it’s very clear why Jobs has been so concerned about it, and has ordered the plugin barred from the iOS.

And, no, my friends, not shipping Macs with Flash won’t suddenly make it impossible for you to retrieve Web content created with that plugin. You will simply have the option to download a copy, same as you do now in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

But are we to assume that, because it’s Steve Ballmer and not Steve Jobs, that approach is all right there but not here? Oh, right, Jobs wants to kill Flash and this is just another nail in the coffin.

Yes, I realize that Jobs, unlike most corporate executives, is trying to look at where technology is going five years from now, and is devising schemes to take us there. Far too many corporate executives are only concerned with this quarter and the next.

So Jobs got rid of floppy discs beginning in 1998, and that was a good thing. He helped banish SCSI from Macs, and that was even better, as anyone who spent hours coping with a SCSI conflict can confirm.

Wanting both the mobile and traditional OS platforms to share as much usability as possible is also a good thing. Microsoft tried to copy Windows and bring it over to their mobile systems, which didn’t work, because the system isn’t portable. Apple simply took the core OS, designed from the get-go to work on multiple platforms, and built a custom interface that was designed to operate correctly on a touch-based system. No stylus or physical keyboard required. Those efficiencies, in turn, can also help make the Mac OS less resource-hungry, faster and more trouble-free.

All that is supposed to be bad, because Steve Jobs wants to kill Flash and mechanical hard drives and thus deprive Mac users of crashes, security leaks, lost data, and other misery. He wants personal computers to function like appliances, not complicated, temperamental machines that only the power user can master.

We don’t want that, some say. We want openness, chaos, the ability to get down and dirty with our operating systems. A PC should be an old fashioned motor vehicle with a start-up crank, where you regularly need to pop the hood or get it up on a rack and figure out why the engine won’t start, or the car veers left when the steering wheel is straight.

Is that what you really want?

If so, you don’t need to buy an Apple product. There are loads of tech gadgets that you can hack to a fare-thee-well, and perhaps that’s best for some. Certainly you can spend literally tens of hours poking into the dreaded Windows Registry to figure out why even a Windows 7 PC might fail to boot.

On the other hand, it sure does seem the public continues to warm towards Apple and its integrated approach to hardware and software, considering the record sales in the most recent quarter.

Now look at another recent quarterly sales report, for example, which demonstrates that Verizon Wireless’s attempts to goose Android smartphone sales with two-for-one schemes isn’t working so well. Sales growth is stalling, while AT&T continues to report decent growth.

Maybe that’s why the iPhone looking more and more attractive to Verizon. Certainly a fair amount of AT&T customers are fed up with poor service — at least in certain large cities — and are aching for a better network. This deal, should it come to pass as predicted widely in recent weeks, will mean millions of new postpaid customers for Verizon, and some people who avoided the iPhone and went to Android, might be happy to trade.

Yes, Verizon Wireless would join other carriers in ceding control to Apple for the privilege of selling an iPhone. But when the dollars and cents are counted at the end of the year, this will be yet another terrific deal.

And it won’t stop Apple from offering the iPhone to Sprint and T-Mobile customers as well. If you look at the way the availability of the iPad has expended to loads of third-party resellers, it’s clear the iPhone isn’t far behind.

It’s also clear that Apple’s integrated approach may freak out some members of the media, but so long as customers aren’t complaining so much, Apple isn’t going to change. After all, Apple may not listen to customers when deciding what new gear to build, but they listen about features that don’t work properly, and sales slumps can even persuade the mercurial Steve Jobs that something might have to be fixed.

It makes plenty of sense for Apple to want to unify the Mac OS as much as possible. Someone moving from an iPhone or iPad to MacBook or iMac ought to be able to adapt without serious retraining. Or at least that’s the theory.

So in the first glimmers of a working Mac OS 10.7, we see how Apple has infused it with some of the stuff from the latest iOS. Chef among them is Launchpad, which basically mimics the Home screen of an iPad. It has, however, complications in its implementation, though one expects Apple will spell out the way it works in the weeks to come.

My first concern is how apps will be added to Launchpad. Will you have to manually put them in the app, or will or just check your existing Applications and Utilities folders and include them all automatically?

The latter approach has its complications, particularly for those of you who have hundreds of apps at hand, and only use a few most of the time. It can mean that you’ll have to page through the interface extensively to find the ones you want. But I would be surprised if Apple didn’t get it, so I would expect that apps your buy from the Mac Apps Store, or are already in the Dock, will get first priority, along with the ones you launch, as you launch them. Maybe there’d be a dialog asking if you want to include that app in Launch pad. The rest would have to be stored manually — I hope.

Mission Control seems laudable, another way of helping you keep tabs of open app and document windows. But Apple’s presentation delivers some concerns too. With all that stuff cluttering your screen, making heads and tails of all of it might prove to be a burden. But I’m not a fan of Expose either, and I use Spaces for its convenience in putting one or more apps in a single virtual desktop. But apps that don’t support Spaces can hurt one’s best laid plans.

The methodologies in adding Auto-save and Auto-resume aren’t clear yet. Certainly both features will work best if all or most apps deliver support, but how would that be implemented? Would Apple expect developers to deliver updates with the new capabilities, or will there be some sort of background process that makes it work for all? I would expect the latter, in the fashion of the age-old Mac OS add-ons that provided global auto-save. Otherwise, it would be downright confusing, since most Mac users would come to expect the automatic saving feature to be turned on for all the software they use, not something only a few apps support.

Some folks have also tried to glean possible subtle interface changes from Apple’s demonstration. One is the invisible scrollbar feature cribbed from the iOS. But I’ve never been a fan, because you shouldn’t have to touch a screen to discover that there’s more content you have to scroll to. That should be obvious visually, so invisible doesn’t make it for me, and I hope the appearance but not the effect is in store for Lion.

The other feature that has also not been officially confirmed is one that would let you resize a document window from more than a single corner, basically restoring the functionality to what prevailed in the Classic Mac OS. Oh well, better late than never; that is, if this rumor is true.

Unfortunately, the preliminary Lion preview leaves loads of questions unanswered, beyond the integration with some of what the iOS has to offer. I do not, for example, accept the possibility that Lion will be an all or mostly iOS-style system. What works on a mobile device doesn’t necessarily translate well to a desktop system, and I’m sure Apple is fully aware of the dangers of making too many changes of that sort.

What you may get in 10.7, if last week’s demonstration is an example, is very much a hybrid. The best of the iOS that works on a traditional PC will be included, but you won’t lose the conventions of your Mac. Launchpad, for example, is evidently an optional feature, an application you launch, as it were, if I understand the intent correcty. It’s not something your stuck with, and the same is true for Mission Control.

That Apple has gone back to the Classic Mac OS — assuming restoring screen resizing capabilities is true — is encouraging. With 200 or 300 new features to devise, it’s not as if Apple can just invent them all and ship a fully baked Lion by the summer of 2011. Adding some flashy iOS capabilities makes it very clear that Apple can look at its other products, or its past, for inspiration.

On the whole, if Apple can include loads of sensible new features, and deliver resource efficiencies that can improve performance to Mac OS 10.7, it would more than justify the expected $129 investment for an upgrade.

I’m also still hoping we’ll see some big usability improvements for the Finder and the Open/Save dialogs. I remain ever optimistic.

As soon as Apple puts a new product into the wild, you just know that lots of devoted Mac users, and tech journalists too, will tear the thing apart to see what makes it tick. But also to see what features it may lack, or which aren’t well implemented.

It surely didn’t take long to discover that the new MacBook Air doesn’t ship with the Adobe Flash plugin preloaded. That’s no mistake and, in fact, future Macs of all models will also lack a preloaded Flash, according to Apple.

Now Apple’s excuse is that they want to make sure you receive the very latest version of Flash from Adobe to be sure that you aren’t susceptible to any potential security vulnerabilities. Consider the versions of Mac OS X that shipped with older versions. But do you really believe them? I didn’t think so.

Certainly, this may be yet another salvo in Apple’s attempts to banish Flash from the planet. The assumption is that, if it’s not already available, lots of Mac users may just not bother downloading a copy, but what do you do when you bring up a site that requires Flash? Pass it by? Or download the plugin?

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So far Apple’s concept of “Back to the Mac” appears to be the process of taking key user navigation features from the iOS and delivering them in Mac OS 10.7. The main issue, however, is whether that move will actually enhance the overall Mac user experience or whether this is all, in part, a ploy to make it easier for iPhone and iPad users to switch from a Windows PC.

Certainly the “halo” effect appears to be in full force. Even though the iPad is selling more copies than Macs as of the last quarter — and that disparity stands to grow tremendously in the coming months and years — there’s still plenty of life in the venerable Mac.

In crafting Mac OS X Lion, very little of what’s new and different seems not to have been heavily influenced by the iOS experience. Obviously the Launchpad, the Auto-Save and Auto-Resume features are all heavily influenced by the iOS. The reported vanishing scroll bars are also influenced by the mobile platform.

That will be great news for people who are migrating from Apple’s mobile products, but do you really need any of those features on a regular Mac?

That is likely to be one of the key questions that folks will be asking as more and more information about Lion is released. Certainly, you can’t count any of them as killer or particularly unique features. Indeed, it may be a situation of lots of flash, but not a whole lot of substance.

Take Auto-Save. Granted, this is a key feature that should have been native to the Mac OS years ago. Consider: Anytime you forget to save something, and a system crash, app crash or power outage occurs, you may lose hours and hours of work. I once had to rewrite an entire book chapter as a result, so I developed the habit of saving every few minutes.

In the iOS, it’s more a process of the OS constantly saving your work, but there are times where you may not want that to happen, or you wish for an undo option, or several, as you already have in some Mac apps.

So perhaps you are working on a word processing document, and you decide that the previous version of a paragraph is a better fit for your project. Having already saved the document in the background, can you revert? Good question.

What’s more, in a segment recorded for this weekend’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, Adam Engst refers to situations where he doesn’t want to save something.

I’ll give you a more direct personal example: In adding an SSL certificate to provide security on my Web server, I’ll generally receive the code for that SSL from the vendor, usually as text in an email, or within an attachment. I will open that attachment in TextEdit, and copy and paste it into my server’s control panel (cPanel, if you wish to know). I don’t need to save or modify anything. Cut, paste, and then submit the SSL, after which my server is automatically updated.

Then again, maybe it doesn’t matter if anything is saved under these circumstances.

Regardless, both Auto-Save and Auto-Resume will likely require app developers to add special code to support the new features. The same might be true for the new full-screen viewing option, although that’s said to be system-wide.

More to the point, what you’ve seen is a very preliminary version of Lion. With nine or ten months left to work on 10.7, Apple will likely dole out features strategically for maximum impact. This week, it was best to talk about the stuff that was inspired — or lifted — from the iOS. But that’s just the beginning, and I’m hoping for a lot more.

Indeed, I don’t know that I’m going to care about Launchpad, or even a full-screen viewing option, and Mission Control doesn’t light my fire. I tend not to use Expose either, although I do have my key apps set up to open in Spaces — the virtual desktop feature that debuted in Leopard. However, Spaces, while quite convenient, is also buggy and some apps abhor its constraints.

One app I use regularly, Bias Peak Pro (a powerful audio post-production tool), is notorious for losing the space I established for it, and ending up elsewhere. Maybe I should return to one of those single window utilities I used to run, such as ASM.

In any case, now that we’re past the eye candy stage, I would hope that Apple’s subsequent Lion updates will have far more steak and mashed potatoes, addressing the long-standing and serious shortcomings of the Mac OS. Certainly making it easier to keep tabs of your stuff, courtesy of a better Finder, and perhaps more informative Open/Save dialogs, would go a long way towards cementing the Mac’s position as the best personal computing platform on the planet.

And, yes, I realize the Macs days are numbered, as the iPad is poised to supplant everything but the high-end of the personal computing universe; some day at any rate.