A very interesting thread. I haven't worked in this particular area, but isn't I...

A very interesting thread. I haven't worked in this particular area, but isn't IaaS the happy medium? If you chose a platform, for example Node, you could shop around for the best value between Heroku, Joyent, CloudFoundry etc. In theory, the only lock-in would be your initial choice of platform, and you would keep the flexibility to scale up instances to meet demand.

Are things quite different in reality? I'd be interested to know.