Having done some further research into the previously mentioned Macromedia Pet Market demo, I came across the Flash Remoting Layer which I hadn't seen yet. The features that stuck out most were:

• Parses and translates ActionScript XML objects on the server into an org.w3c.xml DOM, making any remote service (a CFC, a page, an EJB, a Java class, a .NET DLL, etc.) that accepts and/or returns XML documents seamlessly accessible to Macromedia Flash.
• Enables objects to be passed to remote services by reference and by value.
• Access SOAP-based web services directly from Macromedia Flash using built-in SOAP Proxy Adaptor.

Macromedia certainly seems to be positioning itself well...

Yesterday Macromedia realeased a Pet Market demo application to demostrate what they mean with "Rich Internet Application". The site comes in different version with support for .NET and J2EE backends. Even if I'm not sure if I like the graphical design and I don't like Flash as a format, the idea of these kind of front ends are interesting. Hopefully, browsers will soon be stable enough to build these kind of applications easily while still using open, accessible standards such as XHTML, CSS and SVG. [protocol7]

I bet you could build it today using just IE5+ or Mozilla and Adobe's SVG viewer. IMHO, the major thing that Flash has going for it right now, over these standard technologies, is the fact that it has an rich set of tools to create the content. Flash has a full on RAD enviroment. Right now, all SVG has is your favorite XML editor (VS.NET, XMLSpy, TextPad, emacs, etc.) followed by a  browser refresh.