Syncing is relative when your actually using another mail service to sync with another mail services. You can certainly sync your hotmail with iCloud. What it will do is try and update the hotmail every so often. Or you can manually select to sync. The problem is that if icloud cannot connect to the Hotmail server then of course it will not sync. I personally from experience using Hotmail do not use a mail program except for the one on my iPad.
As I say my problem with Hotmail has always been that its hard to do real time sync with a Web based email. Its really designed to just be a Browser accessed mail and not really thought of as being used in a mail program.
The only one I found works really well is of course Microsoft's own Windows Live Mail App for the PC. My wife uses that and syncs her Hotmail with that. Hope that helps.