I do really like that iTunes keeps a complete backup of my phone. It could probably be done over the cloud someday but it backs up everything even the read/unread status of text messages, icon placement, settings, etc. Everything.
You can go to the store today and buy a new Android phone and when you put in your Google Voice credentials, it will have all of your text messages with their read status. There is no reason a USB cable and laptop need to be involved in that process.
When my wife upgraded her iPhone a year ago, iTunes did a "restore from backup" and her new phone was then (an hour or two later) set up exactly like her previous one, including all applications and their data, saved games, in progress games, options, settings, the lot.
Slightly related, I wish Android would stop using the SIM card's internal memory. Just import the information on there when a new card is detected and forget about it from there on. I had to fiddle for half an hour to get my wife's data from her SIM card into the normal Android contacts. Half of that was because the UI to do so isn't very obvious. (most of the other part was sorting out the duplicates).
Really, there's no excuse for needing iTunes. If Palm can get this right with their miniscule resources, Apple certainly has the capacity to do cloud-based backups. They just haven't made it a priority.