I wonder what held him back from achieving that vision is the first place. AFAICS, Apple is now playing catch-up to Google and Amazon in the cloud computing space.
1. They only had the Mac platform (and non-connected iPods). Can you change the world with a 5% market share?
2. They wanted to charge for it.
Now, they could have done this a couple of years ago after they conquered #1, but they were still hung up on point #2, and just tried to make a better pay service.
2. Who gives their service away for free? Apple still charges for it. It's included in the devices you buy, etc.
Just look at Sony for an example of rushing into doing something yourself (PSN.)
I don't know much about iCloud, but I really hope they had learned the lesson and made it more open by providing APIs, allowing data migration, and supporting tools for other platforms. However, this might be just my wishful thinking.
It's a different ballgame now I think.