No flash plug-in for Safari on new MBA Lion

I had a devil of a time trying not to put adobe flash on my MBA in order to watch YouTube videos. However, in the end I had to relent. I read a lot of info on google leading me to believe that there is either a bug with Lion, or Apple is doing this on purpose in their quest to banish flash from all their products?

OS X used to include it by default but no longer does. This isn't all that surprising though - OS X was the only operating system to include it in a default install (there might be a few Linux distributions that still do it but I'm not sure). This change would most definitely be part of Apple's stance against Flash. In fact, I'm surprised it took them that long.

If you watch a lot of video online, you don't really have a choice (as you learned). While this is changing, it's only changing slowly. Expect this to take a while.

Actually, you can simply sign up for YouTube's HTML5 "beta" (google it) and boom, YouTube fixed.

But installing Flash should not be a big deal. Visit the Flash website, the page will auto-detect what version you should install, install it (close the browser first of course), you're done.

I did sign up for YouTube's HTML5 beta and it did not fix it. I installed Perian, VLC, and Flip4Mac. I tried a few other things that people suggested to others in similar circumstances that I read on the internet with no success. Finally I just installed Flash. Voila, it is fixed. Unfortunately not the way I wanted to fix it. I was trying not to install flash. I don't believe I ever did on my iMac 24". It just worked. From what I have read it has to do with running Snow Leopard on the iMac 24" and not Lion. Unless I am misunderstanding it.

Snow Leopard included Flash, Lion doesn't. That's why you noticed the difference between the two.