When Apple banned Adobe’s Flash from its iPhone and iPad, it knocked the wind out of Adobe’s strategy to bring its widely-used design tools to the emerging smartphone and tablet platforms. This has left most publishers in limbo without a clear strategy to get onto these platfoms.

Of course, no-one expects it to be quite as easy as this video shows, and there are some well-founded concerns that Adobe’s first-generation solution might turn out to be a fair bit of smoke and mirrors.

But put all this aside for a moment and just dream a little about how things might be soon.

It will then be available in late April in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, Apple says. No word yet on whether the Aussies will be sending some of their units down to New Zealand. If not, it seems like it might be a long wait. “iPad will ship in additional countries later this year,” says Apple’s press release. International pricing will be announced in April. The first units will be WiFi only with the 3G units beginning shipment in late April.

Meanwhile, Penguin is not wasting any time showing off its own planned iPad ebooks with Penguin Books CEO John Makinson making some very bullish predictions during the demo, including the claim that ebooks would make up to 10% of Penguin’s book sales in 2011.

“The iPad represents the first real opportunity to create a paid distribution model that will be attractive to consumers,” an excited Makinson told FT’s Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference. “The psychology of payment on tablets is different to the psychology on a PC.”

But Penguin’s thinking bigger than just the one device. Makinson said he sees ebooks hitting 10 percent of book sales next year (it’s currently four percent in the U.S. and Penguin’s ebook sales)…

“We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about.

“So for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications, for sale on app stores and HTML, rather than in ebooks. The definition of the book itself is up for grabs.”

“We don’t know whether a video introduction will be valuable to a consumer. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error.”

Read more from this Paid Content UK story.

And take a look at this video showing some of Penguin’s iPad plans. It’s not clear how advanced these products are or how close to release but it’s clear that Penguin plans to be using the iPad to start pushing the boundaries of the electronic book.

The big event while I was absent was the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week and it delivered on its promise that eReaders and tablet devices would be the buzz at this year’s CES.

This New York Times story covers the deluge of devices announced for reading a surfing.

And this round-up story from E-Paper Central covers the main e-paper based ebook reader announcements well.

For the most part, it will be a few months before we’ll see availability of the new devices, and perhaps longer in international markets, especially if these devices take off with consumers and product shortages slow the international roll-outs. But it’s clear that consumers wanting to read ebooks are going to have plenty of choice.

But a couple of the big announcements happened outside of CES. Google got into the Android smartphone business with the launch of its Nexus One. And the already-overheated rumour mill about Apple’s forthcoming tablet device has gone into top gear with a plethora of stories appearing now that are picking a late January announcement and March ship date for what’s being billed as the iTablet or iSlate. The amount of coverage and detail now emerging makes this look increasingly likely. Another game-changing battle emerging, anyone?