Interesting point. iCloud so far doesn't offer elastic computing, but that difference saide it's essentially the same thing except the developer builds a product and the customer pays for it, with apple essentially covering the developer's back end costs with the fixed cost (30%). The analogy fail when the developer still needs to support an app with separate cloud based services. If apple does extend iCloud to do this stuff then we get the "dream" (simple, fairly thin devices in user pockets, backed by arbitrarily powerful services in the cloud — presumably wrapped in a very simple price model for both users and developers).