It really frustrates me that there are separate clients that do the same thing, but talk to a different domain. If these companies cared about their customers they would be putting together an open source spec for cloud syncing so that we could just pick our favorite clients and tie them to the individual accounts.
Not going to happen. Part of the reason is just what you mentioned: they care about their customers. With various clients they would have to support the problems coming from all of the clients and that would cause their service to look bad even though the problem lies within client app.
That's a crazy weak argument. I'm sure glad JPEG's aren't limited to only work with apps created by JPEG Inc. Dropbox's new image app would be pretty worthless if every company was as insistent about keeping things proprietary.