There is the issue of expertise, to scale this fast into a system that ambitious would be something that apple didn't tackle before. Apple talent poll seems to be focused on other problems, very large scale computing is an expertise Google completely dominates at present and is closely aligned with their core business.
this isn't resolved by throwing money at it, its a whole other class of engineering problems, and the talent is currently elsewhere, much of at the rivals employ.
I think free mobileme and itunes/app sync is coming. Remember that large data center Apple just built?
I've been a mac user for decades but have never used the current mobileme as it just seemed meh, for the money. I sync calendars over google calendar and use drop box and mail attachments for files.
If it was free and beefed up I'd try it and it may just become another Apple sticky.
I think the entire suite of online synchronization that Google provides online to the droids as the rival to mobile.me not just itunes sync.
Google provides mapping services, increasingly important to geolocation services, email, document creation, address book management, not to mention Google voice which is seamless on its phones.
Apple has a great phone, and of course the ipad, but a great number of the users use Google services of which the droid enjoys an extremely fast pace of integration. This leaves Apple in a strange position, where its own clients rely by the millions on its chief rival technology.
Droid can and will enjoy a very fast adaptation to the cloud, and apple doesn't have that scale capability, and to scale to a place that can rival Google in web services will be quite a feat, and a change of focus for Apple.
this isn't resolved by throwing money at it, its a whole other class of engineering problems, and the talent is currently elsewhere, much of at the rivals employ.