I view Apple as still very much a newbie in this space. Sure, they can make it pretty and shiny, but I see them balking on the harder engineering challenges.
For example, because I was one of the doomed MobileMe users, I ended up having two Apple IDs for my Apple assets. As a result of moving to iCloud, I had to ditch one set of assets. Apple assumes you only have one Apple ID, which is fine, but they do not offer you a way to merge two Apple accounts. In other words, their walled garden is so tightly walled it doesn't even play nicely with itself.
Another example is that they don't have a good user experience around communicating what is going to happen when moving data from one device to another. I had the hardest time getting my contacts from my old iPhone to iCloud. What ended up happening is that I had to manually transfer the info (yes, look at the iPhone contacts, type them into a file, then manually type them back into my new iPhone) and actually in the process of moving to iCloud I accidentally deleted all of my contacts without warning. Oops!
So Apple is still really green when it comes to smoothing out all of the rough edges of this complex engineering challenge. My experience with DropBox has been closer to the "it just works" experience.
Since you can sync your contacts with your computer via iTunes, and then sync your new iPhone with your computer, I am genuinely curious as to why you "had" to manually type in this information. Having owned every iPhone except the 3G this has never been my experience.
My contacts ended up in a separate contact group, and there doesn't seem to be a way to pull in contact info from an existing group into the iCloud group.
For example, because I was one of the doomed MobileMe users, I ended up having two Apple IDs for my Apple assets. As a result of moving to iCloud, I had to ditch one set of assets. Apple assumes you only have one Apple ID, which is fine, but they do not offer you a way to merge two Apple accounts. In other words, their walled garden is so tightly walled it doesn't even play nicely with itself.
Another example is that they don't have a good user experience around communicating what is going to happen when moving data from one device to another. I had the hardest time getting my contacts from my old iPhone to iCloud. What ended up happening is that I had to manually transfer the info (yes, look at the iPhone contacts, type them into a file, then manually type them back into my new iPhone) and actually in the process of moving to iCloud I accidentally deleted all of my contacts without warning. Oops!
So Apple is still really green when it comes to smoothing out all of the rough edges of this complex engineering challenge. My experience with DropBox has been closer to the "it just works" experience.