Flash of Insight about Prototypal Inheritance

I've always been confused about how JavaScript inheritance worked, and what
all of these prototype things actually are. Reading article after article after article about prototypal inheritance gave me some more details about how to use it, as well as opinions on its value, but the fundamental model was still missing. But on the train this evening I was reading through the Wikipedia article on Prototypal inheritance when suddenly I had a flash of insight! The reality is so much simpler than anything I'd imagined. Without further ado, here it is:

A prototype is an object to be copied. Thats it. When you create a new object in a prototypal language, it starts out as a copy of its prototype.

Its common to see javascript that looks something like:

function A(){};
A.prototype.method1 = function() {foo};
A.prototype.method2 = function() {bar};
A.prototype.method3 = function() {blah};

Now any new instance of A will have method1, method2, and method3 defined. I guess I'd always thought of this as some sort of magic. But really, its equivalent to

function B(){};
B.method1 = function() {foo};
B.method2 = function() {bar};
B.method3 = function() {blah};
A.prototype = B;
function A(){};

In other words... here's this object B, it has these methods. When you create an object of type A? Just copy B. So simple! So flexible! Why did I not understand this before?

There is, of course a caveat. In JavaScript, we aren't really copying the methods, as that would be incredibly inefficient. There is a hidden pointer (accessible in some browsers as A.__proto__) that points back to the prototype, and the runtime then takes care of delegation. But conceptually, its just a copy.