Steve Jobs is famous for "One more thing"—the final announcement at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in which he lays out the most awesome thing he has to announce.

Yesterday's "One more thing" was iTunes Match, a service that scans a user's library of songs and compares them to Apple's vast iTunes music library. If the service finds a match, the user can treat that song as part of iTunes in the Cloud, meaning it's stored by Apple and can be easily downloaded onto any device. This costs $24.99 a year, and it's what Apple seems to have done with Lala, the music startup it acquired back in December 2009.

Lala allowed users to stream music from the Web to a browser, anytime, anywhere. Users could listen to any song once, or pay 10 cents for the right to stream a song. Another way to get music into Lala's system was to download Lala's Music Mover tool, which scanned your existing music library and matched what it found against its own records. If the Music Mover found you already owned a song, it credited you in Lala's Web system, and you now had the right to play that song. Music Mover was most likely the foundation of iTunes Match.

It's going to be a valuable tool for Apple, and a powerful draw for iTunes in the Cloud. Uploading songs to a cloud drive is a pain, and the manual upload required for Amazon's Cloud Drive, for example, was seen as a major obstacle to adoption. Users will undoubtedly like being able to get all their music into Apple's digital storage unit in minutes rather than hours.

Seeing iTunes Match, however, makes me think that Apple is unlikely to use Lala's streaming technology. With Match, Apple's already getting a valuable and potentially lucrative piece of technology out of its acquisition of the startup. It's possible that Lala's team also helped create Ping, the so-so social network that's now part of iTunes, which is a hobbled version of some of the social features that Lala had.

Given the trend toward limitations on data plans and Steve Jobs' famous concerns about quality (which may, for example, have inspired Apple to make users download movie rentals from iTunes instead of streaming them), Apple may decide that Lala's streaming technology is more trouble than it's worth--at least for now.

The specifications of iTunes in the Cloud will shape the battle for the future of how media content is delivered. Amazon and Google have both envisioned music services that include streaming as a significant component.

Just 11 months after the iPad created a new category of computer, the iPad 2 is here. It's thinner, faster, and packs more battery power than its predecessor--or any competitor. It also packs two cameras for shooting video, photos, or for video conferencing.

The new model doesn't bring any major new technology, though, which left more time in Steve Jobs' presentation than usual for pointing out that competing tablets are still way off the pace.

He laughed at Samsung's Galaxy Tab -- reviewed here -- that debuted last year: "A lot of these were probably on the shelf by the end of the year." And he declared that the latest crop of tablets, mostly powered by Google's tablet-ized version of Android, "haven't even caught up with the first iPad."

Jobs claimed that most iPad rivals are still thicker than the original iPad (9.3mm), while the iPad 2 is a third thinner (8.8mm). He pointed out that five of the six iPad 2 models are cheaper than the most credible competitor, the Motorola Xoom that is the the flagship for Google's version of Android and costs $799. He sounded incredulous while explaining that just 16 apps have been designed for the tablet-ized version of Android, compared to 65,000 designed for the iPad.

It all adds up to news that offers more to industry analysts than tech-loving consumers. Sure, the iPad 2 feels lighter and a little more responsive when multitasking and it has cameras, but if you've used an iPad before you'll notice little different. Tablet fans looking for some more exciting changes currently have to rest their hopes in far-from-solid rumors that iPad 3, supposedly out later this year, will feature major design and technology changes.

Apple made waves earlier this week by announcing that it plans to take a 30 percent cut of subscription services, such as magazines and video, sold through the app store. The company also required that app makers sell through the app for the same price as what's available externally—or less, and said it would not allow links within apps that take customers elsewhere to purchase subscriptions.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the move has invited attention from regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, who are reportedly involved in preliminary investigations.

Part of the problem seems to be the punishing 30 percent rate. Forrester Research has suggested 5 percent would be more appropriate. Carolyn Kellogg from the LA Times writes:

Whether any online retailer will settle for 5% is yet to be seen, but on Wednesday, Google made a move in that direction. In a clear effort to propose a more attractive alternative than Apple's to publishers, the Google tablet subscription model, dubbed Google One Pass, takes a cut of 10% or less.

While magazine publishers have been making the most noise, they're not the ones who stand to lose the most from Apple's new rules, argues PC World's Jared Newman:

To be honest, I'm not really concerned with newspaper and magazine publishers. ... I'm more worried about existing subscription-based services such as Hulu Plus, Rdio and Pandora, all of which have grown to rely on their iOS apps for subscribers. ...For services with high overhead -- say, for licensing music, movies or TV shows -- Apple's new plan presents a difficult choice: Stop supporting the iPhone and iPad, or raise prices to accommodate Apple's 30 percent cut.

The big problem is that even subscribers who aren't using Apple products would be affected by price hikes. Services like MOG and Hulu Plus charge one price for access to all supported devices, so unless they start fragmenting their subscriptions -- a highly undesirable option, I think -- users of other platforms, such as Android, will feel the waves from Apple's ecosystem.

Regardless of what's just, the regulators aren't likely to take the case far, according to Darrell Etherington at GigaOm:

Apple might be susceptible to investigation with regard to the tablet market, where it still holds an overwhelming share, but if the company can convince regulators that in-app subscriptions are part of the greater overall digital and print media markets, then as it stands, it would be impossible for anyone to say they have a dominant overall share, except possibly when it comes to digital music.