Matt Buchanan has written a great piece over at Gizmodo about MobileMe and Apple’s overall problem with iTunes being the center of so many of their services:
A minute after I pull any Android phone out of the box for the very first time, it’s loaded with all of my contacts, emails and voicemails. It took some people hours to setup their iPad.
Which speaks to a more fundamental problem with the iPad and iPhone, that they cannot exist completely independent of a desktop computer, the thing they’re supposed to be replacing. Fantasies of handing your parents an iPad, a very simple computer that’s easy to use and handles most of the things they want to do, like browse the web, send email and share photos, are dashed by this very simple fact. It’s mind-boggling, because it seems so obvious that the only big computer to which an iPad should connect is a server rack somewhere in North Carolina.
The whole “connect to iTunes” solution is archaic. I almost never sync my iPad with my iMac, and I know one day that I’ll regret it. Which is crazy, since my Android and WebOS are reliant only on the cloud.