How do I find my address book in gmail?

What's the deal with syncing contacts between Address Book, iCloud and Gmail???

• In short: how do I sync all my contacts between Mac OS X Address Book, iOS, iCloud.com, and Gmail.com? Not as short: In olden days, I used the Address Book app on my Mac to store all my contacts. Everything in there would sync to MobileMe (and by extension, iPhone, iPad and me.com) and Google (for Gmail). After iCloud was released in October, turning on contact syncing between Address Book and iCloud resulted in a message that said if iCloud contact syncing is turned on Google syncing must be turned off. Googling tells me that lots of people are having this problem, but I'm not finding a solution within all the noise. What am I missing? Any settings to change? Any software? Thanks in advance.

• Answer:

  I have found that the simplest solution is to NOT use Mac OS X address book (and, in fact, not use Apple Mail). By using only the Google Contact list and gmail, I can sync to all my computers, IOS devices (and, android as well). I know folks tend to get a little tin hat about Google, but it's pretty seamless.