Apple's ambitions in the Cloud space have been fairly limited. I'm guessing Mobile Me, and R&D into Cloud Services at this point. They really don't get involved in the Cloud space at all.
By contrast, Micro$oft is investing heavily in the Cloud space with "ready to deploy" data centers. They want to make Azure exceed existing Cloud Service providers like SalesForce, Amazon, and Google. In addition to companies that entirely control a Cloud soup to nuts, there are also Open Source initiatives like Hadoop allowing independent hosting providers to compete in the Cloud space on the Linux platform. It's a very competitive market.
Apple has always been a really great company for smooth intuitive client interfaces, and slick engineering strictly at the client level. No one can beat them for user experience. It's their domain of expertise, and they do very well financially in it. I wouldn't expect them to get too heavily involved in the Cloud space, especially in developing new or competing technologies in such an intense market. I expect N. Carolina will be for experimenting around with proven technologies in relation to the client hardware and software they excel at.
