I'm also pretty sceptical of the 'cloud' claims, we all know the extent to the which the cloud has influenced things so far, which is bugger all, so we are going to be sceptical until shown something.
However, I can envisage a few simple use cases..
Take F1 2011 for example (the last one I bought), there is a massive disjoint between the AI times immediately around you, and the rest of the cars in the timing sheets.. Clearly the majority of non visible AI are on some scripted time line, not the same physics based laptimes as the player is doing. This is exactly where the cloud could help, it could be doing the AI calcs for 50+ cars, and ensuring that you get a 'fair' race so to speak.. I could imagine the Nurb24H being perfectly recreated, the cloud is running effectively the same thing as a MP server, telling the local computer where every single AI car is, they'd all react to you as you where near them.. And those near you would be the only ones that the AI is calculated locally (where latency is key), as soon as you overtake and they are out of your 'zone', the cloud AI takes over for them.. you can run extensive tyre/fuel wear and AI could react to being damaged, it'd be very accurate..
Then there is the time of day.. to get really good performance, the tracks have to be use essentially pre-created textures with baked in lighting (all the main shadows are preset), then only the cars shadows are locally calculated.. the cloud could easily be pre-baking the track textures as time changes, the game only needs that slowly downloading in the background so that it's ready for the next lap (or so, time doesn't change too quickly). If the internet goes down for a minute or so, you just get stuck with whatever prebaked track textures you last got..
I fully admit that I expect to see nothing of significance at all at launch, but it seems easy IMO to think of good uses of latency insensitive loads (that's this years incubation by the way)..
