Sorry, but your story still don’t pans out. You can still sync locally, you can still do full backups locally.
There isn’t a secret handshake to this.
Apple doesn’t magically enable its cloud service. And the best their free service offers is 5 GB worth of backup data on iOS, which is enough to backup most of your local data on an iDevice, excluding, of course, photos, movies, music, and apps. The latter being the least problem, as Apple has them on file, of course. The others you have to backup yourself.
That tier works splendidly for my mother and wife, who have nearly no user generated data on their devices. But who, by this measure, have and current backup of all their important data without having to do local backups.
I work in IT. I will (hopefully) never claim that this and that obscure situation cannot possibly be the vendors fault.
But at this point, your story sounds awfully like one of my colleague who constantly runs into strange problems, because he does want to have some specific feature, but feels the need to use some non-standard ways to achieve them, like using non-functional e-mail addresses to register or disabling GPS on maps and then trying to use real time navigation and stuff like that.
Mobile.Me was a pestering pile of shite when it was released, but that was ages ago and actually resolved rather quickly once Jobs put down his foot…
