I disagree with this. Some of us that need the option of saving anywhere (such as real life intervening) may still like to play at a difficulty level that would be altered by the implementation you propose. I see no reason why difficulty should be tied to your choice of save method.

Because i prefer fluid difficulty, with a "Custom" setting. Let's say 100 is max, and 0 is minimum. There are presets, like 25=easy, 50=medium, 75=hard.
Taking Jagged Alliance as a nice example of a game in which You may choose when You're allowed to save [everywhere, or everywhere-but-combat], which has an impact on the overall game difficulty.
So, for example, You may like what the game has to offer at hard difficulty, but You'd like to save anywhere, so You get 75-[for example]10, so the difficulty is set to 65. I think this seems fair.
Think of SWAT 4 with a "save anytime" feature. Why should it not impact the difficulty level? By all means it should.;)

I've never played SWAT 4. But I still disagree. If I want to play at 75 difficulty, why should the setting be altered because I choose to be able to save where I want to? Some of us may need the option of saving when whenever we want to due to other concerns. Why should that affect our ability to play at whatever difficulty setting we desire? Besides, in a single player game, it has absolutely no impact on anyone else.

Valve's. You get to save TO THE CLOUD.

AND THE GOD OF STORMS WILL SEE YOUR SAVES!

Well, I'm using symbolic links and Dropbox to get the exact same effect on all my games. Savegames are shared between my two computers, and after a reformat it's only a matter of reinstalling the games and restoring the symlinks to get the sync up and running.