The iPad and Apple's Lacking Cloud Strategy

We were on family vacation through Sunday, so when our iPad arrived via UPS on Saturday nobody was home, which meant that we had to wait until Monday for it to be re-delivered.  I wish I could share first impressions this morning, such as Bijan did this morning, but we frankly didn’t get that far.  The iPad appears as a beautiful physical object, but when you turn it on it greets you in a very disappointing way: an icon asking you to connect it to iTunes via a cable!  What a contrast with my experience with Google’s Nexus One phone.  On that, all I had to do to get started was – well nothing.  I was able to turn the phone on and start using it right away.  When I wanted to sync it up to gmail, gcal, etc. all I had to do was enter my google account info once!  Yes, Apple has MobileMe – but it is a paid service and as far as I can tell covers a small fraction of all Apple users.  I believe that for a slate to be truly useful, syncing to the cloud is a critical requirement.