I will reserve judgement on Lion until I use it, but I, for one, do not welcome IOSization of OS X. If it's just the UI glossy layer that gets unified between the two, I can probably live with that, but if they start taking away the ability to get under the hood and use it like a real computer, I'm checking out.

I see the cloud music / iTunes Match thing as Apple opening up the walled garden just long enough to suck you and your content in, then closing it behind you. Yeah, you can go get your MP3s elsewhere, but if you do, Apple's just going to "upgrade" you to AAC 256k whether you like it or not. Eventually, everyone's just going to fall in line with buying from Apple to avoid the hassle. I wonder who will be the first to release a tool that defeats Apple's "matching" algorithm (so that the files fail the match and are therefore imported into your library as-is) without adversely affecting sound quality...

The one thing that seems to differentiate the Apple thing from MP3.com (which I used back in the day) is that MP3.com was streaming your collection, whereas the Apple iCloud thing is (from what I've been able to gather) just pushing the files around to all of your devices. There are pros and cons to each approach, but if they don't have a streaming option, I would hope they'd add one in the future.