One Apple ID for apps... Another for iCloud?

How does this work?

My wife and I both have our own apple devices. I want to be able to purchase apps with one account to be shared across all devices, but sync in the cloud using our own individual accounts (i.e., for calendar, etc).

Any thoughts/help is appreciated

Yup works just like you explained apple id for purchases email for everything else.

apps & iCloud ids

you can have a iTunes account with one id and you can have two iCloud id's that you each can use, if you haven't already then register the iCloud id's different to the iTunes one

it does help to in this case have 3 seperate email accounts - gmail is very good for this (not sure if post MobileMe shutdown if "[email protected]" is still a viable id)

hope this helps

Dave