"I'm not so sure about the idea of editing the clone instance and having it propagate back to the original, that kind of seems like an unusual arrangement to me,"

This happens only for practical reasons.... I mean, if you place 80 clones of an object in your scene, it will sometimes be difficult to find the original.
Also, don't see it as clones of objects... This means 1 object and 79 clones... I think it is just 80 identical objects....