Harry Marks, writing for his Curious Rat website on Apple’s true legacy:

Apple is getting ready to finish the first volume of its 10 year long opus on the true definition of “ecosystem”. With your iTunes ID, you can make sure any music, apps and books you purchase on your Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad are automatically downloaded and synced on all your devices at once. If you start a document in Pages on Lion, it automaticaly saves each change and uploads it to iCloud, then syncs it back down to your iPad where you can work on it later at a coffee shop, or waiting for your train. No buttons are pressed to initiate the sync, no wire is required to transfer the files. Everything is done in the background without the user’s knowledge. Apple’s iCloud is one step closer to making “user error” a thing of the past and that’s the brush being used to paint the bigger picture.

That’s a thing a lot of people are missing about Apple’s plans and also the iterative nature of its OS evolution. Apple very rarely these days pushes massive new features, resulting in people screaming that everything past the original Mac OS X release has been a service pack. But things like Quick Look (instant, browsable previews of items in Finder) and upgrades to Preview (which has gone from Acrobat Reader Very Lite Indeed to a really good app for PDF edits, scanning and basic image manipulation) are attempts to make computing easier, a little at a time.

With iCloud, iOS 5 and Lion, though, Apple’s digital hub dream finally comes to fruition, but in a manner even Apple couldn’t have foreseen a decade ago. Assuming it works, you’ll get seamless computing across devices, a massive reduction in user error for tasks we take for granted but shouldn’t have to deal with (document sync, saving work on a regular basis), and that’s why people like Paul Thurrott look like dolts for dismissing what Apple’s doing as ‘more of the same’ or nothing different to the competition. It’s not about any one feature—it’s about everything. And until Microsoft, Sony and others get this, the playing field won’t be remotely even.