I too have been affected by this. For years, I synced my iOS notes to Outlook (it was the only way to get the notes onto the PC and vice-versa).
I even wrote an Outlook VBA script to automatically export all Outlook notes to text files on the PC (preserving the creation date).
When Apple expanded Notes to support rich text and images, I knew the days of syncing with Outlook were numbered, especially when I found myself adding links and images more and more.
One way to automatically access rich text notes from your PC was to associate it with an e-mail address. The note would be created in the "notes" folder of the mailbox, which you could access from Outlook, if you added the mail account.
The down side was, iOS ignores any edits to notes you make outside of iOS, or any notes you add from say, directly inside the e-mail account. This was really too bad, because it would be really useful to be able to say, create a rule in gmail, to route certain messages to your "notes" folder, which would then automatically show up in the Notes on your iPhone. You could then e-mail yourself messages with a certain keyword in the subject, or what have you, that would go directly into your Notes (kind of an alternative to EverNote). And for those of us who like using Word as an alternate e-mail editor for Outlook, we could edit our notes outside of iOS on a PC with a real keyboard and mouse inside a real word processor.
Now that iCloud is becoming the home for iOS notes, this further moves us away from being able to edit them as files on our computer. Inside Notes in iOS, if you click Edit, you see a "Move All" option. It only lets you move the notes to iCloud or to "On my iPhone". You don't get the option to move notes to the "Notes" folder of any of your e-mail addresses, further "trapping you inside the ecosystem".
Having rich text, drawings and images in notes is a great feature. But as a PC user, I want to be able to access my notes on my computer as an RTF or Word file. I want to be able to do all the things with those files that I can with a word processor on my computer - edit, print, view, etc. - and have the changes automatically mirrored back onto my iOS device. And any changes I make to the notes in iOS should be mirrored to a *file* on the computer. I would also like my iOS device to reflect any changes to linked notes from an e-mail address. So if I e-mail myself a message and have a rule that drops it into the Notes folder, and that e-mail account is linked to notes on my iOS device, that message will show up in notes in iOS. If I edit that message in Outlook, or from gmail's Webmail, or wherever, I want those changes to show up in the note when I view it in iOS. For me, these freedoms will make my life much simpler, and my iPhone much more useful.
Thoughts? Does anyone else agree/disagree?
