I have no problem with Mozilla doing this so long as its not pushed down my throat. I have no desire to use a cloud service.
I think that the resources put toward this endeavor could have been better spent on improving the performance of Firefox, or perhaps reducing its memory usage, or even fixing the numerous bugs that affect it. Firefox isn't as bad as it once was with respect to those things, but there's still much room for improvement.
Functionality that's useful to a comparatively small number of users should be prioritized well behind core functionality that affects basically all Firefox users.
users expect their browser preferences, history, bookmarks, and passwords to be synced across devices. for a significant chunk of ff users, this is in no sense "unnecessary peripheral functionality"