1) Many other companies have succeeded at getting social to work: Ping did not; do you use Ping? I explicitly go into the story with regards to Ping. I know of no one who considers Ping a success.

http://www.powayiliad.com/2011/01/itunes-ping-an-apple-failu...

http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/ping-fail-5-reasons-to-avoid-j...

Even Apple considers Ping a failure, so I'm really not certain where you are trying to go with your argument.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/apple-declares-p...

2) Apple is fairly good at doing things on the desktop, however their server work leaves much to be desired: the way they attempt to rank search results in their various online store fronts is a commonly cited example of this. I have explicitly been told by people at Apple "we are not server people" when reporting issues. (Also, "harvesting" is the collection of data, and "search" is the process of finding data you need in the massive pile you have collected: these are orthogonal concepts.)

3) There are so many issues with this that there is a small industry surrounding tools and teaching people hacks to make this work correctly; I'm kind of assuming you have sufficient context in the Apple community to know much about the specific issues, which is why I felt it was perfectly acceptable to just list "known failures" rather than having to say "this is how why this one failed".

http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_solve_all_your_mob...

http://www.cultofmac.com/82971/how-to-fix-mobileme-sync-prob...

http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:discussions.apple.com+m... (12,600 results)

4) You realize who you are talking to, right? Do I really need to defend this? The sheer fact that I have been, for years, operating what is probably the largest private-sector man-in-the-middle attack ever (many tens of millions of devices worldwide, literally billions of stored signature blobs), on Apple's products, an attack that would be trivially solvable by techniques literally taught in intro-level encryption classes, should be sufficient (but of course when you do what I do you have tons of stories to tell).

5) I haven't had this happen to me, as I don't use iCloud: this has happened to numerous other people, however. Here is one example user (of many), from May, with the non-saurik names changed:

--- Day changed Tue May 29 2012
01:04:34 <xxx> this iCloud shit is getting ridiculous
01:04:59 <saurik> xxx: ?
01:05:16 <xxx> saurik: I upgraded my phone, but my iCloud backup was 7GB, i've spent the last two days straight trying to restore it
01:05:38 <xxx> (if the download is interrupted for one second, it fails, and there is no download resume or anything similar or way to download to iTunes or anything)
01:05:50 <xxx> and on my slow internet, 7GB takes about 13 hours to download
01:06:10 <saurik> ouch
01:06:20 <lmrpq> I backup everything minus the Camera Roll, so my backups stay small. If I update, I use iTunes for a one off backup/restore.
01:06:56 <xxx> yeah; i should have disabled the camera roll
01:07:33 <xxx> saurik: I don't think it fails if the screen doesn't turn off, so right now I'm sitting with it for the ~9 remaining hours on my 7th attempt tapping the screen.
01:07:35 <lmrpq> However, the backup I made before upgrading to 5.1.1 turned out to be corrupt (wtf?) so I had to restore from iCloud minus Camera Roll.
01:07:46 <xxx> lmrpq: how do you restore minus camera roll??
01:07:50 <xxx> oh, iTunes backup
01:08:02 <xxx> i want to restore from iCloud without camera roll, for maybe ~500mb
01:08:08 <lmrpq> No, my iCloud backups don't have camera roll, so I had to do that
01:08:12 <xxx> hmm
01:08:15 <lmrpq> I was not happy.
01:08:19 <xxx> maybe i could finish setup
01:08:20 <xxx> jailbreak it
01:08:26 <xxx> remove the "setup finished" flag
01:08:32 <xxx> hook into the setup script
01:08:41 <xxx> skip parts of the download
01:08:45 <xxx> :<
01:09:25 <xxx> hmm maybe i could also go somewhere with > 10mbps internet
01:09:37 <lmrpq> Apple has a lot of money. I wish they put some of it into making stellar cloud services.
01:11:18 <saurik> xxx: what kind of device?
01:13:03 <saurik> ah, I'm going to resume 4S? (as you said iphone)
01:13:47 <xxx> yaeh
01:13:55 <saurik> I guess its time for the drinking bird
--- Day changed Wed May 30 2012
00:07:33 <xxx> iCloud restore failed.
00:07:37 <xxx> :(
00:07:42 <xxx> time to start again!

The best part of the entire report (which you will note was still plaguing this user a day later, as near the end the timestamps reset for May 30th):

00:42:52 <xxx> all i really want is my chrono trigger save game :(