The only correlation between email and cloud computing is, both store their data on a remote server that is administered by a (hopefully) professional system administrator.
This alleviates users of the responsibility of having to administer their own systems (backup, filesystem management, etc.).
What's special about 'cloud computing' is, as people begin to trust online sources (like google) to store their data you'll see the culture of the web shift to become a platform where people use webapps to do all of their work and their personal computers will become state-less machines.
Google is working on a radical implementation of this called ChromeOS. It's basically an operating system that's nothing but an enhanced web browser. The platform itself is geared to allow the users to offload the responsibility of managing data to the cloud by being an 'almost' completely stateless platform.
The benefits are:
- users don't have to worry about managing data/files
- cloud servers usually have a routine backup schedule so, if a server crashes, your data can be brought back up online with little or no loss
- cloud servers usually have hardware redundancy built-in so, if a hard drive dies, it can usually be immediately replaces with no data loss
- cloud servers usually have redundant mirrors in varied geological locations to allow users a route to their data in different geological regions across the globe with a minimal affect on latency
- cloud services are a lot better at managing data than the users are
- if computers become stateless, there will be no necessity for a large internal hard drive to store data, a small capacity (16/32Gb) SSD would be more than enough.
- If your data isn't attached to the computer you're using, you'll be able to access it anywhere anytime, no matter what platform your using
The disadvantages are:
- people still aren't willing to trust online servers to 'take care' of their data
- if the company you charged with storing your data decides to become 'evil' they could lock down your data and charge you to regain access to it (much like there are rumors that facebook is thinking about charging a monthly fee for their site).
- there's no way to guarantee that the organization running the servers storing your data are doing it in a safe and reliable manner. Hundreds/thousands of credit card numbers, social security numbers, personal identities have been stolen on the net because of private organizations that did a poor job of handling database/system security.
- there is no formalized service platform to transfer files from one organization's server to another. For instance, if I wanted to backup my GoogleDocs to Dropbox I couldn't unless I downloaded those files and uploaded them to Dropbox locally. You'll probably see a solution to this issue in the near-future if one isn't already under development.
Email has proven successful as a platform to let the 'cloud' handle messages between users. Cloud computing, aims to handle all of the user's files in the same manner.