It's only overkill if the user is aware of the infrastructure. If you make notes on your Mac, it auto-syncs to your iPhone, blah blah, the user is only vaguely

It's only overkill if the user is aware of the infrastructure. If you make notes on your Mac, it auto-syncs to your iPhone, blah blah, the user is only vaguely aware that complicated computation is occurring behind the scenes. Think of email. Email pretty damn complicated behind the scenes, all to send text to other people. Why don't people just write letters to each other!? Why bother with all this error prone infrastructure? Because if it's done right, people aren't even aware of it, they just click send and get instant value.