But do 80% - 90% of customers want this? Doesn't the complaint that iCloud services are not accessible from any computer rest on the assumption that people are frequently accessing their data from different computers? What are the reasons someone would do this? I could think of a time a few years ago when, say, I was at a friend's house, sans laptop, and needed to check my email, so I logged into Gmail, etc, but I have my smartphone now. The email is with me on the go. Where is the data to support the claim that consumers use web services frequently on anywhere other than their own computers? I'd like to see that.
And I think Apple had a study sample in MobileMe that showed that even with web front ends to the 3 arguably most important on-the-go services: contacts, calendar, and email, that customers rejected (or didn't need) the web app because they owned smartphones! What's more, this is a biased sample, the customers who found the service so compelling that they paid $99 a year for it. It was very likely that the data showed that the web apps were by and large ignored.
Apple's iCloud represents a bet that the rest of the Internet services--Google, Flikr, Facebook, can take the other side on, and we'll still be able to use those services on Apple products.