It's not that the basic idea of the "cloud" is bad in itself but the problem is that it introduces unneeded fragility in frequently used Internet services for the end-users. At best, it can be a transition strategy toward something greater.
Previously, if an e-mail server went down, a smaller number of users would be affected, not thousands of them, and especially not whole unrelated companies which just happen to host their e-mail infrastructure in Google's own. If you had a device, it would continue functioning even if the manufacturer disappeared (and not just "dropped a product line").
The world of technology is rapidly changing, and in it we can quickly see what were once slow processes in the "real world" - the conglomeration of global companies and the forming of de-facto monopolies. Just as having few global megacorporations instead of a vibrant competitive environment is bad for the end-customers, so is having a few big clouds. This is not to say that globalization is bad, just the form of it which produces single points of failure.
The idea of the Internet was originally decentralized and I want to keep it that way. This is, among other things, why Android is more important than iPhone (unless/until Google makes it impossible to work without a cloud).
#1 Re: A couple of Anti-Cloud links
Both of those examples are true of 3rd party software from vendors. I don't see anything particularly "cloudy" about either of them.
In fact, that reality that in Google's case I got world-class backup restoration and pay nearly nothing for it (which is kinda cloudy) seems to me a "win" story.
Conclusion for me is that The Cloud moves problems more than sovling them.