in a lot of ways developers have been 'liberated' by these cloud systems to be able to scale apps rapidly, plus we are also only in the early stages of the cloud, it will be interesting to see how the playing field levels as more players enter the market.<p>on a related note, <a href="http://incubator.apache.org/libcloud/" rel="nofollow">http://incubator.apache.org/libcloud/</a> is a python client thats trying to create a unified library for a bunch of popular cloud hosts