I think you're missing the point of Apple's cloud services.
They exist exactly and only to make the user experience of their devices better. They don't make sense outside the Apple ecosystem, and that's how I imagine it's intended to be.
I have a mac and an iPhone and an iPad and I just want to be able to text my wife on any of them and have it work. That means contacts need to be synced, and there needs to be an answer for how the messages are synced between devices. Same with notes/calendars/etc. iCloud is hiding beneath all of it, and the whole point is that you don't see it, you just see your contacts list works everywhere you look.
They exist exactly and only to make the user experience of their devices better. They don't make sense outside the Apple ecosystem, and that's how I imagine it's intended to be.
I have a mac and an iPhone and an iPad and I just want to be able to text my wife on any of them and have it work. That means contacts need to be synced, and there needs to be an answer for how the messages are synced between devices. Same with notes/calendars/etc. iCloud is hiding beneath all of it, and the whole point is that you don't see it, you just see your contacts list works everywhere you look.