Can the iCloud sync progress be observed? I have my Mac running OS X 10.8 set up so that I can see the contents of its iCloud repository at ~/Library/Mobile Documents (see this question and this question for more information on how that works). However, I'd like to be able to see / visualize / understand the sync state of my Mac:


Is my Mac in sync with iCloud?
If not, what is being uploaded /
downloaded / how long will it take?
Are there any utilities or
built-in features of OS X that will allow me to see any of this?


These are valid questions even without iCloud explicitly exposed in the filesystem, but are obviously more useful if you copy bulk numbers of files in/out of the iCloud repository explicitly.
There are no built-in OS X tools designed explicitly for showing you iCloud synchronise information.

As of OS X 10.8.2, Apple has not made this information public. Unless Apple publish OS X Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) to provide the information you seek, no third party will be able to accurately provide the synchronisation details.

Given this, please give Apple's iCloud team feedback; let Apple's engineers know what you want and why.

While you wait, you can track connections to Apple's iCloud servers, measure traffic flow, and disk access. These metrics will provide some insight but they will not provide expected durations or percentage complete measures.

To explore the data flow, explore the OS X's built-in tools like lsof and netstat.