The recent article of steve jobs link made me think about the future of flash. I'm learning actionscript 3.0 in my studies but is it the right decision still to go for it? I was pretty sure that I will be able to build application in as3 for iphones/ipads in the near future. It seems to me, while I would stay with flash, the market will be polarized by apple and adobe and you will always work double for both clientele, or just lose half of them. Which decision would you take as a designer, if you were still at university and you intend to become a freelancer?
This question has been around a lot of times. For my opinion on flash's future please look at this answer: Should I Abandon Adobe Flash for HTML5 and <canvas>?
If you are a designer, you will probably actually feel good working with Adobe's Creative Suite, including Flash CS3/CS4/CS5. CS5 will be able to export HTML5 in the near future: http://www.9to5mac.com/Flash-html5-canvas-35409730 . You shouldn't be too worried. OTOH you should consider, that whatever CS5 exports is likely to perform poorer in HTML5, than on flash player.
From my perspective as a developer, I think there is no harm in learning any language, altough ActionScript 3 is relatively boring and easy to grasp. However this makes it a good language to learn programming, including many best practices. The most important things you learn as a programmer transcend languages. The more languages you try to really fully understand and exploit, the better you become by understanding the approaches they promote.
My personal advice to web developers is to have a look at Haxe. It is a much more powerful, elegant and expressive language than ActionScript and it allows you to target many platforms. Enough to build a whole web app on 'classic' platforms with only one language. Haxe's C++ backend allows building native iPhone apps using an SDL based port of the flash player API, although currently it's not very clear whether Apple's policy will allow distribution. Nonetheless it is an open source language with an enthusiastic community, that moves really fast and adapts to changes rapidly (e.g. unlike ActionScript Haxe can leverage flash player 10's alchemy opcodes for fast memory access) making you as a developer independant.
edit: I have personally dropped any plans of targetting the platform until Apple is willing to ease its very restictive policies, since I find this kind of behaviour intollerable. Nonetheless, I think Objective-C is a great and inspiring language, so you may actually wanna have a look at it.