Photo sharing, a basic need!

Hi, I've been using Gallery to share some my photos with my friends and family that live in a different country. Almost all of them have a PC and I've been creating albums in iPhoto and publishing into Gallery. Once I have them published I used to send the link for them to access and see the photos. Pretty basic need, I would say, no complex, straight forward, no need for sky, clouds, stars or whatever is there to make our life more complex!.

Of course with this migration to iCloud I lost all my links I had in Gallery (blame on me as I didn't read the many emails I've received preventing this happening... but guess what?... I'm just a simpler user!, and I'm proud of it! - that's what I'm on Mac). Of course as I've never relied on iDisk (as I will never rely on iCloud) I didn't delete my photos from my iMac. Long story short: I haven't lost anything yet!.

My point for this discussion is why now do I need to go to Flickr or Picassa or "God knows what" to do what I consider it's a pretty basic need for anyone: to share photos beyond my multiple Apple devices and beyond me, myself and I!.

I believe Apple is making a big mistake if I now need to have an account in Google just to be able to share my photos through them instead of being able to do it from "my Apple small (but used to be effective) world".

Am I the only person thinking about this? or did I miss something there (apart from my Gallery links...)

thanks