IPhone – How to use iCloud to sync Pages documents from iPad to iPhone

Unfortunately, Macintosh does not (yet) support complete iCloud synchronization for documents. We can only hope that Apple will implement this at some point soon.

In the mean time, go to http://www.icloud.com/ and sign in. You can drag documents to and from the appropriate section on your computer, and it'll work with your iPad. There's still another bug, which involves Mac > Mac syncing, but as long as you just do iPad > Mac or Mac > iPad, it'll work fine. :)

Also, there is a folder located at ~/Library/Mobile Documents/ which contains your iCloud-enabled apps' data. This includes the iWork suite, but unfortunately iWork documents aren't saved as the normal filetypes (e.g. ".pages"), so they can't be opened on their own.

The same things happens to me. After some digging around I found this from Apple:

Important: You cannot download a document from icloud.com to your Mac or Windows computer until the document has been opened on an iOS device.

My guess is that this is a symptom of iCloud's "work in progress" status, and that this functionality will eventually be there. Considering that you are only asking to download the exact same file that you uploaded, though, it is a pretty silly restriction.

Update:

For me, the behavior has recently changed. Now if you upload a file from your computer to icloud.com, you can download the original file to any computer from icloud.com. You still must download the document to an iOS device before you can download the file as a PDF or other format.