Bad Apple. Fancy paying for and building a multi-million dollar server facility and not making it free to use for everyone.
But if you’re not bothered about cloud storage, not beyond photostream at least, then you can set your iphone/pad up to automatically sync to iTunes with your laptop/desktop, so it is effortless. I’ve then got a folder/album set up in iTunes and I can drag and drop photo’s into it and it syncs with my iphone so I have a selection of photo’s on my phone – no need to have every single photo I’ve got on my phone at all times.
I think between photostream, iCloud, any other cloud service you might use and your laptop/desktop all possible permutations of back-up, sharing and storage are pretty much covered. Even sharing photo albums with friends works a treat, well those friends with iPhones of course.