Many of the people who talk about "the cloud" and - perhaps more importantly - spend money on it are only quasi-technical.
They are CIO's and managers in charge of purchasing an email solution. They know they need a "cloud strategy", and vendors are quite happy to tell them their solution is "cloud based" if it make them happy.
Actually, I was wondering the inverse - if using the cloud is only useful as a technical term rather then using it for some faceless/mindless strategy to a CIO or Manager.
Take for example, cloud storage. I would not sell "the cloud" part to a person, rather, I would sell them the fact that it's hosted and highly reliable, infinitely scalable, pay as you go and cheap compared to a local storage cluster buildout.
I wouldn't sell them the cloud part, as not all things in, on and around the cloud inherit all the features the cloud might bring (meaning, you can screw up an architecture no matter where it's implemented).
But unfortunately many times the people with the budget don't actually care about the features. The word "cloud" is important to them because their CEO read about it in a glossy magazine, so they need to be "cloud enabled"
You need to be careful, though because sometimes "cloud" is seen as a negative. I've seen companies that state "We don't believe in the cloud and we have a purchasing policy that excludes any cloud based solutions" - but then you dig deeper and find how proud they are of the "hosted solution" they bought from a vendor because of the way they don't have to pay for capacity until they use it.
Sigh..
(Advice for young players: Enterprise sales will kill your soul)
They are CIO's and managers in charge of purchasing an email solution. They know they need a "cloud strategy", and vendors are quite happy to tell them their solution is "cloud based" if it make them happy.
So yes - it's mostly useless as a technical term.