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There is skill in blackjack, its just that no amount of skill can overcome the cards. The cards always determine the winner in blackjack and the only thing you can do is maximize your percentage expectation (which is always negative unless you count cards).

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Again, I really don't agree that this is the reason that blackjack is not considered a game of skill. If you slightly modified the game of blackjack to make it +EV, by forcing the dealer to stand on 16, it would still be a game of chance even though it would be possible to beat it in the longrun. I mean think about it this way. If the powerball lottery grew so inflated that it were actually somehow +EV to buy tickets, you definitely wouldn't call the lottery a game of skill. Whether a game is 'beatable' is incidental, not consequential, of its standing as a game of predominately chance.

This is really the major problem here. Yes, poker has a large element of skill - but how can you formalize this and prove it? You can't just circularly argue that "Poker is a game of skill because it involves skill." You need to be able to layout a set if criterion showing if a game is predominated by skill or chance. And poker must fit this criterion while games like blackjack must not fit it. I can't even begin to imagine what this criterion would be. Poker and many other games predonimated by chance are very closely linked. What distinguishes poker?