MobileMe + Dropbox is the best combination. I have used Google Sync for years and it does work great but only if you are accessing via the web interface. When you try to use it within the iOS applications and Mac applications (Mail, Address Book, iCal) things start to get hairy. Like you said with the name fields, they don't transfer well and sometimes can cause conflicting data or duplicates. MobileMe is made to work with Apple ecosystem, no surprise it works much more flawlessly.
Dropbox is a better substitute for MobilMe's iDisk. Much faster and 2 GB is free so I just use it for documents and programming projects. I have plenty of free space. I have 3.5 GB though (Dropquest just last week gave 1 GB total for free) and many other things like that.