Agreed. Hopefully OpenStack or similar gets some serious traction and the IaaS players move closer to simply being providers of hardware. The likelihood of that happening seems quite slim while AWS holds such a strong position in the market though. And a significant chunk of AWS's success is due to their innovation in the software layer.
One could draw a lot of parallels between OpenStack/AWS and Android/iOS development. It is in the best interest of an OpenStack provider to differentiate their offering rather than compete on price through the common platform. Just like how there are power users who want to configure, build and have full control of their mobile device, there's a huge class of people that just want a working stack from one provider. I consider Rackspace to be relatively far along in implementing the OpenStack vision and they're still a far way behind in the offerings AWS has. Google is in a similar position with their new cloud initiative.
Like with HTML5 I'd like to see all of the main datacenters implement full stacks and then have OpenStack be a 'codify what works' project. We need 4 or 5 providers who have the depth and breadth of what AWS has.
