I'm upgrading my wife's laptop from an old MacBook to a newer windows based laptop (thanks for the free laptop, Telus). I believe you can manually copy everything in the 'iTunes' folder over (I know this works Mac -> Mac, never tried to a PC), but I'm curious if this process can be done by iCloud? or is iCloud purely for synchronization of content for iOS 5 based devices?
The line is a bit blurry to me as pretty much everything in iTunes is just content for the iPhone now.
Best Answer
Short answer: no. Longer answer: maybe, but probably not yet. Most of the iCloud pieces integrated into iTunes are for iTunes/App Store content. You can re-download all your purchased music and TV (not sure about movies yet?), but it doesn't sync playlists, and outside of the US (guessing you're in Canada given the Telus mention) you're out of luck at the moment due to separate content deals. Eventually with iTunes Match, you'll be able to get non-iTunes music from iCloud for a fee ($25/year), but it's not coming until November in the US, and later for the rest of us. It's not clear how iTunes Match will deal with playlists, but if it's like the current system for transferring purchased music, it probably won't sync playlists, just give you all the music in one heap.
Your best bet is to just copy your iTunes directory (~/Music/iTunes on the Mac), including the iTunes Library.itl and .xml files to the default iTunes folder on your new PC. If you don't already have all your media files in the iTunes directory, you'll probably want to do that if you have the space, to make things simpler when transferring. iTunes will do the rearranging for you, just go to File→Library→Organize Library and check Consolidate files.