Blame it on Apple for conjuring up talk of “cloud” so much recently, with their announcement of iOS 5. Industry pundits are now immersed in possible deeper meanings and hidden enlightenment that can only be appreciated with patience and understanding.

You know, Apple being the almighty “experience trumps technology” experts, they surely must have a better understanding and conceptual implementation of the cloud than everyone else, right? They must have created iOS 5 to school us all on how the cloud should “really” operate, behave, and be perceived. Just you wait – in a few years time, we’ll all think back to how silly our perception of the cloud was in early 2011.

I digress.

As much as I loathe the term cloud, I think what we’re seeing from Apple is a richer overall experience across all of our devices. You can call it “sync” or “cloud,” but I think Apple is trying to knock down the whole concept that an application and a remote server are two separate things. By uniting the two in a smooth, Apple-like fashion, they may have unintentionally altered how future implementations of cloud-based apps should function.

But in the end, it’s still a remote server and client-side application.