John Gruber from Daring Fireball recently posted his thoughts on the imminent release of iCloud and his thoughts have brought to light the actual purpose of iCloud. Gruber’s thoughts on iCloud is that it is more of a replacement for iTunes than it is for MobileMe.

“But in short let’s just think about the ways that iCloud might be a major, dare I say game-changing, step away from USB tethering between iOS devices and iTunes running on your Mac/PC. Consider just the new out-of-box experience. Rather than “Take this out, plug it into your Mac or PC (after first making sure your Mac/PC is running the latest version of iTunes), wait for it to sync before you actually play with it”, you might get something like “Take this out, turn it on, sign into your iTunes account, and start playing with it.”

This brings to light the thought that I had today about MobileMe. What is going to happen after iCloud is released? The rumored features of iCloud have nearly nothing to do with what MobileMe does so why would it be replacing it? MobileMe is a email, contact and organization tool all in one place in a neat and organized fashion. Yes you can get the same services for free elsewhere but if you own an Apple product, MobileMe is by far the easiest way to sync between all your Apple products compared to using Outlook, Gmail and Dropbox. Apple is all about having stuff easy out of the box and that is essentially what MobileMe did for Apple product owners.

So what is going to happen to MobileMe after iCloud is released? There were rumors that MobileMe could become a free service from Apple which would be the dream of all Apple consumers, but Apple being Apple, that scenario is very unlikely. What is more likely however is a major price reduction of Mobile Me to around 50 dollars per year or less with iCloud being an add on to MobileMe.

MobileMe hasn’t been a great success that Apple has projected to be, but Apple isn’t a company that easily accepts failure. I could definitely see Apple revamping MobileMe somehow, but I highly doubt that they will rid of the service. iCloud will be a great complement to all your iOS and Mac products but how necessary is it? I have over 2000 songs and I still have plenty of room both on my iPhone and iPad in addition to harddrive room on my Mac.

iCloud will be among one of the major announcements tomorrow along with iOS 5 and the final release of OSX Lion, but don’t expect to see some sort of magical revolutionary service put out by Apple. But then again it is Apple and with them, you never know.