Some recent NPD data showing the Android platform overtaking the iPhone in the US has set the web on fire. Apple apologists like John Gruber are working overtime to try to spin it.

Remember back when Daring Fireball was actually an interesting site? Now it’s like I imagine Pravda was during the Cold War.

In any case, I was a little shocked to see the gains come this quickly. Android was obviously making a dent, but I expected another generation of products to flow through the market – like the Incredible and the EVO 4G, and eventually the long-anticipated onslaught of Dell vapourware – before Android really took hold with mainstream consumers.

And of course iPhones are still selling. They’re selling like hotcakes, for that matter: Apple reported a more than doubling of sales during the period in question (kind of undermining the notion that it’s some sort of calm before the 4G storm).

At this point smartphones have a limited market saturation, which is why it’s a critical juncture and why there’s a bit of a race to perform a land grab. It remains anyone’s game.

In a year we might be looking at the emergent dominance of Windows Mobile 7 phones. Or maybe the next iPhone model will storm the market. Or WebOS will be reborn into a real contender. Or maybe Blackberry – the strangely unmentioned leader of the pack – will really wow the market with their next cycle.

It is critically important that there is competition in the space. Competition is great for everyone, including for iPhone users (see the upcoming multitasking that is a virtual clone of the implementation in Android). The market can’t be dominated by one vendor, especially one with walled gardens.

Speaking of walled gardens, as much as HTML5 got talked up during the Great Jobs-Adobe War of 2010, in reality HTML5 performance on the iPhone and iPad is abysmal and is close to unusable for rich content.

The real alternative to Flash on the iDevices has been native, single-platform, completely-proprietary apps. Which is arguably a perfectly fine approach (take full advantage of the platform and all), but it was incredibly frustrating seeing HTML5 used like such a cheap sacrificial prop during the debacle when it really had perilously little to do with the debate. It was so grossly dishonest.

Of course I’m speaking outside of videos. For videos Flash is almost always a completely unnecessary wrapper around an h.264 stream (which is what many Flash videos come encoded in these days). Separating the video from the container is a no-brainer.

Obviously HTML5 needs to keep improving. With Android 2.2 around the corner there are wide expectations that they’ll introduce a JIT compiler for the Dalvik engine (“native” apps largely run in a VM runtime and are currently seriously hobbled by the lack of optimizations in the same), and it would be fantastic to see something like V8 for the browser as well. While the platform has far-and-away leading canvas and dynamic graphics support, it falls behind in scripting and that would be a nice gap to eliminate. It would be nice to see a decent dynamic HTML 5 capability built into iPhone OS 4, as currently it is seriously deficient.