I sure as hell don't. I look forward to the day when everything is in DropBox/iCloud/Bitcasa/whatever and I can finally stop lugging around 2 external hard drives for backup and worrying about what would happen to my data if somebody stole my laptop.
iPads have software state: booted, OS version, OS mode, current app, volume, what the app is doing...
iPads have user-state state: songs, contacts, high scores, the way the apps are laid out, pictures, videos, other pictures, other videos, FACEBOOK, emails, signatures...
We know all of these things. An iPad is a small flat touchscreen PC with some prissy software and expensive accessories and most anyone in the tech involved world can distinguish between all of these layers and figure out what's wrong when something's wrong.
For the tech uninvolved, there's no real distinction between any these states. The iPad is. The iPad is, for lack of a better word, an appliance. It is a thing they bought to do iPad.
“Hey Marco, I had the iCloud put on my iPad. Now I can’t even do anything with it."
It is no longer an iPad. The user-state-state is gone because of a misunderstanding and there's nothing that can be done to retrieve it. The user doesn't care how, why, whatever. iPad is not working.
What Apple is doing with iCloud is removing maintenance and reducing the chances of catastrophic loss of user-state-state. They are further ahead than basically anyone at this point, and had iCloud been running on the iPad in the story, it would have been near impossible for that iPad to become a non-working iPad. It backs up all of these things:
( Purchased music, movies,
TV shows, apps, and books
Photos and video in the Camera Roll
Device settings
App data
Home screen and app organization
Messages (iMessage, SMS, and MMS)
Ringtones
)
and quite a few more datatypes they don't advertise in a strong legal construct that allows Apple unbelievable flexibility and ability to make products that do things as expected. It is egregiously hard to delete an iCloud, even if you try.
State is a service. SIAS. State As A Service. Make whatever acronym you want.
So you're suggesting users shouldn't have control over "songs, contacts, high scores, the way the apps are laid out, pictures, videos, other pictures, other videos, FACEBOOK, emails, signatures" ?
No, I'm saying they shouldn't be responsible for where those things are or how to get them back when they aren't there anymore. Hence, "management" or "maintenance". I'm not quite sure what word I'm looking for.
Your average user expects an OS update to be nothing more than new features, they don't know/expect of anything to be wiped out, or know any kind of possible data loss might occur,
I respectfully disagree. The average user has no idea what an OS is, or why you would update it. It's something they do, under instruction, because other people are doing it.