So, it appears that we weren’t crazy after all with all of that talk of a mysterious 12th application on the iPhone! It disappeared for a reason…

Apple, proving that they are not someone you’d want to reckon with in a poker tournament, took the wraps off of yet another iPhone feature — YouTube!

Despite the crowd of naysayers who cried out that no Flash support on the iPhone would mean no YouTube, there will, in fact be a method for watching skateboarding bulldogs and piano-playing cats.

Using the same, high-quality H.264 encoded videos that YouTube had already agreed to transcode for the AppleTV, the iPhone will stream the videos through an Apple-designed application on the device.

As MacRumors points out, iPhone has dedicated video playback hardware for H.264, which should give it better battery life that Flash would have.

Additionally, Apple has re-done the iPhone website again, answering my question about why they had failed to update all of their video ‘tours’ during last week’s update.

Now, you can enjoy all-new versions of all of the videos. Some even reveal minor changes to the UI on the iPhone since the January videos, including new contact-related buttons at the top of the SMS display and new flag widgets on the visual voicemail. Also, the traffic and directions buttons are now clearly visible in the Maps app.

Further, it appears that Yahoo! has cut a deal with Apple (or vice-versa) to be the data provider for the Weather and Stocks widgets. When these applications were showcased in January, they resembled the Mac OS X Dashboard widgets of the same type. Now, however, a Yahoo! logo is clearly visible in the bottom left corner of each widget — likely a link to Yahoo’s pages.

This is a departure from the Mac OS X Dashboard widgets, which get their data from AccuWeather.com and Quote.com, respectively. This may foreshadow a similar change for the Mac widgets in Leopard…

And finally, AppleTV’s first update is now available, adding the announced YouTube streaming and some security updates.

PS: In case it wasn’t obvious that I’m excited about the possibilities of this little device, I’ve added a little countdown widget in the sidebar…