If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, a number of Apple's competitors must be blushing in the wake of WWDC 2011. With Cupertino's unveiling of iMessages -- a service that may sound all too familiar to users of RIM's BlackBerry messaging service -- and a number of system tweaks for iOS that mimic the features offered by a number of apps available via the Cydia App Store, it appears that Apple is paying close attention to what their business rivals have been doing.

As stoked as we are to see these great perks coming to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users this fall, we feel there's a few more tricks that Apple could learn from the other guys. Here are five of our favorites.

1. Dropbox Integration With Just About Everything

Despite the recent finger wagging over Dropbox’s privacy policy, the service is, in a word, awesome. Its cross platform viability is the stuff of legends, providing both Dropbox users and application developers alike with a stalwart cloud storage solution to draw upon for their every online need. Have a document you’ve been working on at the office that needs to go home with you? Upload it to your Dropbox. Are you a developer working on an app for desktops, Android or iOS? Does it require storage for anything that it does? Well, you’d better make it sync with Dropbox.

Say, Apple, you maybe could get on that sort of thing with iCloud? Just think of how much more desirable iCloud be if it were to become a viable cloud storage commodity for every app available from the Mac or iTunes App Store. That’d be a cloud computing solution to rave about.

2. Music Streaming a la Google or Amazon

Apple bought LaLa last year. They've built a massive server farm in North Carolina, and they offer some of the best mobile computing hardware on the market today. So why can’t Cupertino get a handle on music streaming? Amazon and Google are rocking streaming services, and while there’s no denying that having to upload your 30 GB music collection to the cloud sucks, being able to stream your entire music library through any web connected computer, smartphone or tablet is nothing but w00tsauce. We’d love to see Apple take a page from the books of their competitors, providing their loyal iTunes users with the a the high-quality music streaming service with an ingenious Apple twist.

3. LogMeIn Style Remote Access For A Better Back to My Mac Experience

Services such as LogMeIn, GoToMyPC and Splashtop all offer compelling remote computing experiences, allowing Mac users to connect to their rigs via most web browser, iOS or Android device. Back to My Mac? Not so much. Requiring a MobileMe subscription and a router that supports either UPNP or NAT-PMP, as well as a set of byzantine set up instructions that can befuddle novice computer users, setting up and using Apple’s remote screen and file sharing solution can often ends in defeat and frustration. We’d love to see Cupertino ape some of the features and functionality that have made other remote computer control services so popular and easy to use.

After all, shouldn’t a service offered by Apple "just work"?

4. Web-based iWork

With iCloud and ubiquitous file syncing soon to be a reality for OS X and iOS users, this one is really a no-brainer. Where’s our web-based version of iWork, guys? Are you telling us devotees that you can’t provide us with an elegant web-based interface to create and edit our documents? Seriously? If Microsoft and Google -- companies that gave us the Zune and Google Wave -- can create compelling and easy to use web-based productivity suites for their users, surely Apple can do their users a solid and blow us away with some awesome online productivity options of their own.

5. Flash

So maybe we don't want a direct copy, but we’d certainly like to see Apple hop on the bandwagon for this one. While there’s no denying that HTML5 does a bang up job of presenting rich, interactive web content, it’s still far from being the de-facto interwebz standard that Cupertino claims it will one day be. In the meantime, those of us rocking iOS devices are being denied access to the whole internet whenever we’re away from the computers. Would it be too much for us to ask that iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users be given the option of being able to access Flash content when we want to or turn it off to save battery power when we don’t?

Probably, but if you’re gonna dream, we say dream big.

Follow this article's author, Seamus Bellamy on Twitter