
This saves me precious battery and improves the quality of my results.


That would suck hard on a phone it's much easier to offload that capability (and corpus!) to the cloud. For example, if I snap a pic of a business card, the text on that card is OCR'd and made searchable. Not to mention that things like Evernote do a lot of processing on the data you send them that would be onerous on a portable device. And some of my devices are quite tiny I don't want to lose my data when I lose my device, so I'd at least want some kind of automatic remote backup. Why? I don't just use one device, so I want easy, transparent access to my data no matter what I'm using. Well, Google's interest is certainly in getting data but they wouldn't be able if there weren't a market for it.
