I don't see this as a big problem. There are bound to be many cloud vendors competing for our business, so we as consumers can demand data portability. And we can still have control of our software if we host it ourselves. There's nothing stopping anyone from writing an open-source gmail clone that we can all run on our own servers.
Odd, b/c what we have now is a string of failures (cough rackspace cough) (cough DNS failures cough) (cough rackspace again cough), connected to quite a few companies that don't have good guidance on data protection or privacy control (facebook, microsoft/danger), bound up by an internet that isn't nearly as ubiquitous or reliable as we want (AT&T). Access to those services is still in question: net neutrality is still under debate, and I'm seeing services blocked at the employer (can't let corporate secrets get out via google docs!) and ISP (long story) level.
For what? 99% of what we want out of the cloud is solved by a good laptop and a reasonable backup system.
Ask me again in 5 years (and it'll actually be 5, not 1 or 3), but right now, the cloud isn't worth it.
I don't disagree that there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. I also don't disagree that 99% of what the cloud offers is solved by a good laptop with regular backups. But that's kind of like saying 99% of what twitter offers can be solved with public mailing lists and a character limit. That doesn't mean twitter isn't worth using or creating. (OK maybe not the best example since I don't use twitter myself but you get the idea.)
And what about this scenario, which isn't too far fetched in my opinion: your ISP provides you with private cloud storage, a software stack, and your own dns name for you to host your own private web-accessible applications, each installable with one click.
There is still the problem of reliable internet access, but in time I think we all know internet access will be as ubiquitous as electric power and we will trust our ISP just like we trust our power company: we completely ignore them until the power goes out for a day, we get really mad, wait for them to fix it, and then forget it ever happened.
