iTunes Cloud Music
We’ve already seen what Amazon and Google think cloud-based music should be, and color us “meh” on the first and “not bad” on the second. But there’s plenty of room for improvement, starting with cutting the deals necessary to get the music business to embrace such as service so we don’t have to spend… oh, let’s say four and a half days uploading our library of 6,000-plus tracks to take advantage of this.

We Like Free. Free is Good.
Amazon Cloud Player offers 5GB of storage (with 20GB for a year with any MP3 album purchase), while Music Beta by Google allows you to store 20,000 tracks (for now) -- so what might Apple charge for iCloud? We like the sound of “free,” at least for the cloud music stuff… after all, we already paid to buy these tracks, do we really want to pay just to borrow them briefly for streaming?

Don’t Tie Us to Only iTunes
Apple is playing nice with the music business, securing the necessary licenses to hold a digital locker of music, which we’ll have access to based on some kind of “scan and match” technique -- iCloud will know what music we have, and let us stream it. But what about music ripped from CDs we own, or tracks purchased from Amazon MP3? Those should be included, rather than just the tracks we buy from iTunes.

Speaking of iTunes…
Most of us have a love/hate relationship with iTunes, but only because we have to. Want to sync your iPod? Gotta have iTunes. Need to stream a movie to your Apple TV? Gotta have iTunes. We get it, Apple… you like keeping us chained to your infrastructure. So why not revamp iTunes while you’re at it? You know, wireless syncing, maybe even a web-based interface to access all of the stuff in our digital locker from any computer.

Make It About More Than Music
Don’t get us wrong, our music library in the iCloud will be amazing -- but why stop there? It should be able to house our iTunes movie and TV purchases, iBooks, ringtones and even apps. Sure, you’ll always want to store this stuff on your computer so it can be backed up, but nobody wants to be chained to that computer all the time.

iCloud + Activation = Bliss
Anyone who has used an Android smartphone or tablet has to be laughing at us Apple fans -- every time we buy a new device, we have to jack it into iTunes to activate it before we can do anything with it. By comparison, Google gets it spot-on by allowing Android users to sign in with their account and start playing as their data is synced in the background. If iCloud can’t do this, we’ll cry tears of blood.

It’s Gotta Be Integrated
Hey Apple, ever compared iDisk and Dropbox? We have, and there’s no contest -- Dropbox does exactly what we want it to, quickly and with style. By comparison, iDisk is slow, disorganized and… well, we just don’t like it very much. We figure you know this and are planning to integrate iCloud deeply into Mac OS X (as well as iOS 5), but, you know, do it right, mmkay?

Gallery: Fix It. Seriously.
There are parts of MobileMe Gallery that we love, like using iPhoto to easily create albums and push photos to the cloud, or the universal iOS app to view them from anywhere. But the rest kind of stinks, especially the way movies coexist with photos, rather than having their own options for storing and sorting them. We’d love to share iPhone 4 videos with family, but right now it’s simply a bummer with MobileMe.

Don’t Forget, We’re Not Always Connected
Services like MobileMe or iTunes Sharing are great -- until we step out of the comfort of our cushy wireless connection and into a wilderness of poor 3G coverage or God forbid, no data coverage at all! iCloud must account for such a scenario in some way. The Dropbox example is a good one, because they’ve pretty much nailed how to solve that dilemma.

Don’t Lose What We Love
For all of its faults, MobileMe excels at keeping our Macs, PCs and iOS devices synced. Email, contacts, calendars, even bookmarks -- they just show up on a new device with a simple login. So Apple, we implore you: Keep the good stuff and don’t try to reinvent the wheel here. Now go dazzle us already!