I really don't think that's "the whole point." For me, at least, the point of the cloud is to have the data safely off my local systems, safe from physical theft, damage, or failure. The next advantage is to have access to it anywhere. I have both of these things, and so do you.

What you want is to have your iCal information in the cloud, but you haven't found a service that does it 100%. Again, that's not the fault cloud computing, just Google's non-support of iCal's tasks. I understand that that sucks for you, but I know that for me cloud computing has made my life a whole lot better/easier, and it works flawlessly for the most part.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not giving Google a pass on your specific issue. I have found that using Google as the hub is always the best way to go, and that things get messy when you try to make something else the root of your information and try to force Google to work with it. I'm not saying it's right, that's just sort of how it is.