Well, this is a question everybody has been discussing. But today I found one really blog which actually made an animation of the type you watched in Flash some 3-4 years back. Check out this link here.

This Animation by Anthony Calzadilla, is really amazing and has used jquery built in delay fiunctions to switch between the different CSS frames.  HTML +CSS3 is a decent combination but considering the kind of animation which can be done using flash is no match for it. But a lot of unnecessary things are being done on flash which is not at all required as that can be done on simple html and css.

Do we need a separate swf player when all that can be done using HTML and CSS?