How to keep myname@me.com when moving to cloud?

I've had an active mobileme email account for over a year on my daughter's family plan.

I installed iOS 5 on my iPad a couple days ago when it was first available. Yesterday I upgraded Lion on my iMac to 10.7.2. Then I tried to install iCloud. Contacts and Calendar seem OK, but email doesn't transfer nicely.

Apple says If you have an active MobileMe account when you sign up for iCloud, you can keep your me.com or mac.comemail address... http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4597.

Well, this is wrong, misleading, incomplete, or I've done something wrong :-). Elsewhere, Apple say: to move your email account from MobileMe to iCloud,

go to me.com/move. When I did that, it dropped me directly into 'find my devices', and it found my iPad, but not my iMac. When I try to move email, either on the iMac or iPad, it tells me I have to select a new email address. It says, velman@me.com is already in use, so I should select a new one. Suggests jvelman@me.com. Both my wife and I use this same address on the iPad -- we both have the same last name! but we have different initials. In addition, changing email addresses is a lot of bother.

I really don't want to select a new email address. Do I have to just wait till next year when MobileMe stops? Or will that even work?

Enough griping, other than this everything is pretty nice. Does someone have a way around this email address trap, or know of a contact who can help?

Thanks,

John Velman