You need iTunes match for that, a separate paid service, and most of my music is ripped from CDs and most of it was matched.

-----

Anyway, once you enable iCloud and iCloud backups of things like contacts, mail, calendar etc, you will see a new contact group in Contacts (iCloud), etc, and you should start seeing a complete unified set of contacts, etc on each device. Once it's up and running, you can try it by creating a new contact in that group on one device and see if it shows up some time later on your other iCloud enabled devices.

If you enable the photo stream in iCloud, you will see a new album in photos with the photo stream.

What exactly are you looking for? Did you enable iCloud backup on the ios devices? that's the main thing you want I think, in case you have to replace the device, you can do it anywhere and restore it from the cloud. This setting is separate from the individual items, in Settings/iCloud/Storage & Backup/iCloud Backup, and in that same place you can see when the last backup was or if one is in progress. The first one will take a while.

Anyway, there's really nothing to see when it's working. it's just one of those things that should just work once you've set it up.

Also, they don't show you the photo stream on iCloud.com, if you have a mac, you have to use iPhoto or Aperture to see the photo stream after you've enabled it on the mac. Not sure where it shows up on a PC, but it's supposed to work there also if you set it up.

-David