There are still occasional, but very annoying, outages and/or hiccups in Apple's 
.Mac system.  I hope it's just a side effect of the millions of semi-idle accounts that are set to expire in a week or two.  Now that I and many others are paying for the service, I expect better continuity of service - especially now that I use many of the offerings.  From Backup to 
iSync, email to iDisk, 
.Mac is becoming a significant piece of my Macintosh experience.  Hiccups affect that experience negatively.
This is one of the most important aspects of the interconnected 
web services based world - if a piece of the chain goes down, the ripple effect can be significant.
Since many of the .Mac services are in a transition phase from the simpler free iTools offerings to the new for-pay integrated .Mac offerings, some hiccups are understandable.  But the issues - whatever they may be - better be solved soon.
I still have to promise that part 2, about the web applications on .Mac, is coming soon.