Apple's cloud is about exchanging data. It's about developers having a unified sync interface that will allow them to write apps that share data between all of your devices without having to design, secure and maintain a cloud themselves. That means that the vertical markets will be even more specialized and that simple software can continue to be developed to provide real solutions. It may be that behind the scenes all Apple is using is WEBDAV or something similar with JSON and that in the future, because of corporate needs, they'll allow developers and thus users to control the server used.

It's hard for me to understand all the hatred. I think people are just short on facts and experience to understand that what Apple is doing, is solving real problems for developers so that they can provide real solutions to users so that users will be interested in buying Apple devices. For me, that is customer focus!

Microsoft, in particular has recently said that they are going to focus a lot more energy on developers, so perhaps even they see how Apple's path to developer assistance (the changes in XCode for iOS-5 are going to make massive improvements in productivity I think), is really helping make the Apple platform attractive to users because of what developers can do with it.