I can't figure out what you mean about the benefits of syncing being lost, because the data is clearly synced. However, I can explain the "shortcuts" you're referring to. Those are for native Google Docs, which don't have a universal representation in other applications (they're tied to remote or locally stored web state) unless you explicitly chose to export to another format. Whereas Microsoft's SkyDrive is just raw MS Office Documents.

The tradeoff between the two is that with Docs you get real-time editing and collaboration, but if you want a real local copy you'll need to target a specific export format. Whereas SkyDrive always keeps a local copy, but it requires you to explicitly save and resolve conflicts if you want to collaborate with another user.

Of course, if you want to you can just use Google Drive as a dumb file syncing mechanism without real-time collaboration or online editing. You just don't use Google Docs and tell Drive not to convert files to Docs on upload.