Among the many compelling reasons for users to jailbreak their iPad, the simple ability to play music while using other apps has been on the most widely-cited benefits from enthusiast users. After all, what is more elemental to the personal computing experience than playing a little music while getting some work done?

For the first time, Apple is actually letting iPad users in on the music bandwagon, and this time they don’t have to utilize a security exploit to do it. Instead, users can utilize MobileMe iDisk, the online storage feature within MobileMe that gives users access to files from all their Apple devices, including the iPad. An update to MobileMe iDisk was released that allows users to stream files from their online storage straight to a music player on their iPad.

While that isn’t much of an improvement over other services like DropBox, the update has added the ability play audio files while using another app, something that is exclusive to iDisk for the time being. That is, at least until iOS 4.0 makes its way to the iPad, which could be as far away as November.

The update does raise at least two questions for iPad faithful. If the iPad firmware in its current state allows for streaming music in the background while using another app, why not iTunes? One could understand their reluctance to allow the feature in third-party apps, but why not their home-grown music properties?

The second question is why isn’t Apple working on more far-reaching cloud-based streaming music architecture for iPad and iPhone users? Requiring users to manually store the music they want to listen to on iDisk’s online storage is a much less elegant solution than simply hosting their complete iTunes library on their servers and giving access to it on all approved Apple devices. Apple recently assured music labels that their future with cloud-based services were “modest in scope,” but why?

For now, iPad owners of the 16GB variety will continue to have to find ways to skirt the limited storage of their chosen devices, despite the fact that there are inklings of better options out there.