I was writing Flash-based apps/sites at the time and there wasn't a single device we had in our QA set that we thought was "acceptable" in its performance. It was buggy. It'd crash out of nowhere. It'd consume so much memory that user's apps were force quit left and right. It would kill a battery with a quickness such that we had one customer who had to carry multiple spare batteries just to use the app we wrote for their internal team.
It was bad in every way a thing could be bad.
You probably recall that mobile internet in general was far from fluid in those days; Browsers couldn't handle multiple tabs well, and iOS would show an annoying mosaic if you scrolled web pages too fast (before the browser could render the page). I would rather have the option of having something imperfect available, than have the OS vendor lock them out entirely.