25GB free online storage from Microsoft?

Right now I'm trying out Windows SkyDrive which offers a free 25GB of storage. Frankly I'm amazed to receive anything free from MS, particularly something that it seems I can use with ease in Linux.
I had been using Oosah with a too-good-to-be-true 1TB of storage absolutely free. Unfortunately it turned out to be just that, too-good-to-be-true, and it seems to have gone belly-up some time ago with a lot of my photos irretrievable.
I've also used both DropBox and UbuntuOne but I get the impression with both that you still need to keep all of your uploaded files somewhere on your computer system. Therefore, you don't actually save the storage space on at least one of your computers and they seem to be more for syncing between your various boxes.
Now I will admit that I haven't fully tested out either. There are two reasons for this reticence on my part: I really don't want to go to the trouble of uploading all my stuff and wiping it off my computer only to find that the service is stopped in 6-12 months time. The second reason is that uploading can be painfully slow. Right now I have access to about 40 kB/s upload. This means that to upload 10GB of stuff (40% of SkyDrives free allowance) would take nearly 5 months.
Anyway, as MS is unlikely to fold in the near future, I think I should be safe enough here. So, I'm going to see if this genuinely will allow me to take a lot of immediately unnecessary, but valued, stuff off my HDs.
from the few tests I've done it looks very good. Perhaps download rate is a little slow as I only got 50-140 kB/s when downloading a 45MB file so looks like the MS servers are either overloaded or slow.