Well the way I think about it Flickr is still a 'publication' service rather than a storage service. So you store your pictures in your cloud, you upload the ones you want to share to Flickr. This is the model my Dad uses for example (pushing images he wants to share to Picasa but leaving the bulk of his photos on a storage unit at home). His challenge was he decides he wants to share one while not at home, and he can't, but with this private cloud abstraction he can, he just shares it like it would from home, except rather than being at home and uploading it from his storage stack he is on the road and uploading from his storage stack.

When Picasa loses favor with Larry and gets shut down, his data is still safe he has just lost his ability to point people at Picasa and can switch to Flickr. My assertion (which I agree is yet unproven) is that we didn't start designing things this way because bandwidth to the cloud was always better than bandwidth to your 'home' (which was largely dial-up early on).

But unlike a pure storage container I'd love to be able to use an email service which will 'drop off' my email into this infrastructure, which I can read at my leisure but not have it stored in the 'cloud' where it can get lost (or perhaps spied upon).

In some ways your satellite TV receiver (especially if it has 'sling box' type capabilities) is sort of along the system design models of having a captive bit of compute/storage in your home that offers you service on the road and at home, and the vendor can push content into. Think about that for services other than just TV.