What am I missing with documents in the cloud?

[newmaeve]

I've been playing with putting documents in the cloud and this was a service I was really anticipating. It seems to work fine if you have apple products only and use pages only. However that was not how the promise was restricted and even if you do use apple products, it's not so seamless. First of all if I create a word doc on a pc and put it on the cloud (which is really a matter of having an internet connection and dropping the doc onto a web page as far as I can tell,) then I similarly have to access a web page on my desktop mac to find the document there. When I click on the (word) document on the mac it won't open - not in pages nor in word for mac. If I tap on the same document from pages on the iphone, it burps, tells me it has to change some fonts but then opens it. (Hurrah!) So back to the mac mini and now that the iphone has done all the work it will let me download it. But wait, download it? So now I'm faced with downloading versions and having to upload versions. This isn't what I had in mind when apple talked about seamlessly pushing docs to all devices. It's pushing them to a website - what's so new about that? Why can't it operate like dropbox where I don't have to worry about versions etc? If I change it, it goes back up on the server. Why can't it just open the files and let me work on them, no matter the platform on which they've been created? Why can't I organise my files under folders (as in dropbox?) Or, am I missing something?