Apple, you want to really see Mobile Me take off and become ubiquitous and necessary? Include a free year with each iPad. It probably costs you little (server space, bandwidth, which you already have a lot of).
MobileMe doesn't need to be free to be great it needs to be reliable and fast. Also Apple needs to bump up the storage to something equivalent to what DropBox offers. Maybe not 50GB since MobileMe offers more, but def 40GB. I've had MobileMe ever since iTools. I generally like it but with all the free services that duplicate what MobileMe does it makes it harder every year to renew -- even at cheap eBay prices.