Rumour has is that Adobe have just about finally bowed to Apple's decision to push HTML5 as the way forward on their iPhone and iPad, because they've supposedly been cutting numbers on their Flash development teams.
So possibly we may be seeing the start of the demise of Flash, Shockwave and Air whilst Adobe refocus on their core specialisms and perhaps look to new innovative technologies that don't have a reliance on proprietary browser plugins.
Unlike PDF, Flash, Shockwave and Air are proprietary Adobe technologies, not open standards (PDF is an ISO standard). Therefore any third party attempts at making a flash player would be based on rather morally (and legally) questionable reverse-engineering development methodologies.