I find it somewhat strange that among a 'hacker' community that has long championed the Nokia IT line that has required hack after hack, would find the omission of a micro SD card to be such a strong repellant. Has anyone considered uPnP for local media streaming? What about gpg to further protect online data?

I have a 16gb nexus 7, and I have had no problem whatsoever with my local, non-cloud media. I simply stream it from my laptop. My collection is massive. It is many-fold larger than the largest SD card which means that I would need to constantly move things back and forth. Streaming my media over the network is an order of magnitude more convenient than moving it via USB or S/FTP, etc.

I could also use neutral services like Amazon S3 for storage if I really wanted this content on the road, and even hide it via encryption. For those that love convenience, or are not as technically inclined, there are the media streaming services Google Play, Amazon MP3, Netflix, etc, etc, etc.