iCloud increasing the effective storage of the phone is about 10% of the value prop. Your point is like "dropbox is just rsync + a VPS".
No push notifications (this is unsurprising, Apple runs the push notification servers, and those cost money). I don't see anything about linking against third party libraries.
---
More to the point, you keep using this term "rent seeking" to describe Apple selling optional services. Nobody is forcing an iPhone owner to pay Apple for services. Rent seeking implies once you have the thing, you have to pay rent on it. That's just not true for iPhones.
Don't cite the deep magic to me. Calling my comment "flaimbait" for asking if you understand the differences offered between an SD card an cloud storage is an extremely poor interpretation of my comment. Please refer to the HN guidelines.
Cloud storage and a $30 SD card are in basically no way fungible. It's just not what fungible means. Calling an SD card fungible with cloud storage is more incorrect than calling Dropbox fungible with "rsync + VPS".
Paying for Apple One is probably the best deal of all my services, based on how much I use it and the value I get.
Here I am, enjoying my 4 year old iPhone, happily paying Apple $3/month for iCloud storage.