John Gruber praises iCloud as one of the best things but do people really feel that way? I feel Dropbox or Google Photos / Drive is way better on software experience.
I should probably add that I don't even think Apple is capable of making good online services which is one major reason I switched from iPhones to Nexus/Pixels in 2013. Sure you can use Google services with iPhones but for things like Google Photos they will always be better integrated with Android.
iCloud works excellently as a backup and sync service now.
iCloud photos is as good as Google Photos.
Apple’s service chops have really improved, as evidenced by their rollout of Apple Music which had no service related complaints (the complaints were around policy) AFAICT.
iCloud Photos really isn't as good. The AI features, face recognition, free backup is all better on Google Photos.
Let's look at Apple Maps for example, do you ever think it will surpass or meet parity with Google Maps?
Look at icloud.com services with the online office suite, calendar, etc. Will that ever come close to Google Docs?
The "put things into a folder to share with other people" aspect isn't really mentioned which would be the Dropbox or Google Drive use case you are talking about I guess.
Personally I think it works just fine, also as a Dropbox equivalent if you don't need to share it with other people. As soon as you want to share something it gets annoying pretty quickly though in my experience.
Once I setup iCloud on my parents’ iOS devices, I’m fairly confident that if something goes wrong, they won’t lose their data, especially their photos. This is in sharp contrast to the early years where I would have to constantly remind them to backup their phones to their computer because iCloud wasn’t reliable.