Why does Notes need a me.com account for the iCloud?

Actually, I'm wonering the same thing. I have a friend who has been set up to use iCloud using his regular E-Mail address (not me.com) to log into iCloud and sync his contacts, calendars, etc.. But apparantly not his notes.

He is trying to understand why some of his notes dissappeared and it turns out that notes wasn't turned on in iCloud settings on his iPhone. When we tried to turn it on, it required a me.com address, so we created one. Now all of his notes are gone, and new notes from his mac or iPhone 4s are not syncing between devices.

I too would like an explanation. Why so many ID's and email accounts. What happened to KEEP IT SIMPLE?

Have to agree with above.just got iPad to reduce clutter in my life not add more unnecessary email accounts. Can anyone from Apple provide a reason or better still advise how to avoid the need for a me.com account?

I am also wondering about this. Tried to enable syncing notes on icloud and it told me to get a me.com email. No thanks, I already have too many emails and passwords to remember. Just waiting until Apple hopefully changes it.

Apple 'notes' are maintained simply as an email. if you have a mac, you'll see them maintained in your in-box. However, the mac mail app does have a setting to filter them out as separate items within the mail app. Regardless, yahoo allows for notes sync as does gmail I believe ... I often suggest people sign up for the me.com email address, even if they don't intend to use it, if for nothing else than to reserve the one they want and to be able to use iCloud syncing of notes.

I think as soon as mountain lion comes out it will remove the necessity for a me.com account...

Sadly it didn't remove this necessity.

Well it did add it to the notes app via the system settings. Which I enabled. It asked it I wanted to merge my notes from my mac to icloud. Of course I said yes in hope that my phone could then do it. Nope! Looks like the phone need a software bump as well to fix this issue.

Leo, keep in mind that the iOS is still looking for notes in the email. Just because Mountain Lion is out, doesn't mean that notes can suddenly be somewhere else without imparing all of the iOS devices

nmaves, something to look for: if you weren't using icloud notes before, your iPhone saved them all local to the phone. On the notes app, you'll see buttons in the upper left that will take you back to the account locations. My hunch is that you'll see 'on my phone' and 'icloud'. You'll need to move them away from the 'on my phone' into the icloud for them to appear. No real way to do that from the phone short of copy/paste from an old note to a new note on the iCloud.

Once you delete all the 'on my phone' notes, the iCloud will become the default

This is the dumbest invention ever. How could they included Notes iCloud in the iOS 5 release but not fix the limitation of using a mac.com account.

I've just been looking into replacing SimpleNotes with the Notes.app and run into the same problems. This seems to be a huge oversight on Apples part. Looks like I'll be putting up with the bugs in some of the simplenote apps.