[malandrew]

    "It's all of Apple's cloud offerings, including email, 
    contacts, calendars, iWork, backup, document 
    synchronization, data-specific synchronization of various 
    things like keychain and mail accounts, photos (storage, 
    syncing, and galleries), it even covers their services 
    like Find My iPhone."

Yes, but almost all those APIs are made available as a cloud offering to Apple software only. Third party developers are only afforded the ability to interface with most of these APIs via APIs in FoundationKit.

If I can only get access to this stuff via an API on the device, then it is not really cloud API. It's not like Apple is making these APIs available to developers via something like REST.

The only ones that are available are those that have a strong open standard that Apple can't wall gardenify like IMAP/SMTP, CalDAV and CardDAV.

[eridius]

Since when does "cloud" require an API that's open to the entire world? That's never been part of the definition of cloud services before. And there's no compelling argument for why Apple should try and open up iCloud to people who aren't using Apple devices (which is to say, there's no good argument for why it's in Apple's own interest to do that; obviously there are arguments for why other people might want them to provide that access).

Also, there's no such thing as "FoundationKit". There's a framework Foundation.framework, but most of the iCloud-related APIs live elsewhere.