InfoPath and "Cloud" woes

I was recently forwarded an article from a professional colleague that brought a little bit of a dark shadow to the promised land of "the cloud".  I'm a big fan of InfoPath for its ability to empower Power Users to build what they need; especially the ease of accessing web services.

Regrettably in Office 365 it is not possible to make use
of your SharePoint User Profile Service web service with InfoPath Forms Services (InfoPath forms in a browser on SharePoint).  This prevents your online forms from gathering information about users from just the place that was designed to let you do so in SharePoint.  Due to security concerns, Microsoft will simply not allow it.  This is a negligible issue that could be evaluated, in an on-premise implementation, for acceptable risk but the decision is out of your hands when using cloud services.  InfoPath will be replaced in the future, but currently I believe that it has no peer except for 3rd party vendor software.  Please read here for the article about the scenario and further resources.