Yeah, it might not be the cloud itself, but it's my transition to the cloud that requires a higher degree of interoperability. When I was just syncing my phone to my desktop over bluetooth, there weren't as many moving parts as when my phone is storing things in Google's cloud, and then my laptop needs to read and write to that same cloud. Semantics, really.

It doesn't seem to be just Google that sucks at tasks. Remember The Milk is fine, but how can they not support iCal sync? Tasks would seem to be similar to, if not easier than calendar entries. I'd happily use some other service just for tasks if I could get it all to work right.

Oh, I just remembered another limitation I don't like: you can't sync over shared Google calendars to iCal. Like, I'm subscribed to a US Holidays calendar and a couple of sports team calendars in Google, but I can't see those from iCal. Instead, I have to subscribe to iCal versions of them from my laptop, which won't necessarily be the same. The whole point of the cloud is to have data in one place and access it from multiple clients, and, so far, I'm really not getting those advantages because of all the interoperability problems.