Google and the other cloud companies' strategy is mostly all the same: they want to charge rent on every computer application possible. What has started to change in popular perception is the image of the cloud providers having all of your data. Why should they have all of my data? A reasonable reaction to the status quo of cloud applications.
This is just as nefarious as a traditional SAAS application, if not more so. Google is setting up a system whereby you can have the data on your own machine, but the actual logic of how to interpret the data is still loaded off of a server on-demand, with the end goal being that they can charge you rent to access files on your own device. Pretty cool for them, but seems like a raw deal for the end-user.