yu won't have to go check the machine to see if some eejit turned it off, perhaps the switch instead. :D
The providers, will essentially manage the hardware, I can't see them maintaing an army of people to add a new user, allow access to mail boxes or not, set up groups, quotas, rules for every customer they host though.
If bthey do it will cost though, and either by transaction or a flat rate so some will lose out.
The front end might change a bit, some aspects of the role will go, others will be needed, but the underlying concepts are sorted.
All the cloud is, for this sort of thing is remote virtualisation, another form of outsourcing. If you were the "mail guy" at a business, how often would you need to actually touch the server itself?
Like the other responder I've been in IT a long time (87 in my case). Take it from me it's just SSDTechnology.
The fundamentals are pretty much fixed and to be halfway decent you need to understand them, so in that sense MCSE 2003 won't be wasted . If MCSE 2011 comes out soon, the recruiter boys might prefer you to get that though.
Look at it this way, the admin roles could end up with the big providers. There could be less of them, but they will be maintaining many servers, so they'll need to be competent, if you aren't qualified you haven't got a prayer.
The cloud by definition means that they people who do the management of the service do not need to be in the place where it's hosted either.
If it bothers you that much, beef up the networking side, it's strong now, and it it will become even more critical locally if the cloud takes off, because you need that connection all the way through to them.
