Certainly. But on a bad drive, usually some amount of data could be recovered. If some cloud storage disappears, it's immediately over.

Also, one other factor that may be important to the discussion is that the USB drive was private. Now somebody hacks a cloud service and your data is potentially in a Bittorrent swarm the next day. Seeing what people put on the net nowadays, I don't think they realize the difference.

tl;dr: educate your loved ones.