Most people seem to forget that the origin of the term cloud was networking. You just shove your packet into the internet and it magically comes out where you want it to. Because you don't know what is going on inside you just draw it as a cloud.
I know what you mean. I spent like four paragraphs on the first version of this post I did for Mashable in '08. Left it out this time for the sake of brevity, and because it really doesn't seem like it took (since people still don't remember).