"Just as easy" might be an overstatement. Equally doable might be closer to the truth.
One example where virtualization is easier in practice is where you're not in control of the network intfrastructure -- ie: you subcontract management of switches etc to someone else.
For someone the size of Etsy that wouldn't matter much -- they have an obvious need to manage the entire stack. But for smaller institutions that might not target "scaling up to serve the entire public web" -- it is a factor.
Another example is if you have heterogeneous hardware -- it is much easier to just install a hypervisor that runs on every box and then manage that via your vm-toolset, that set up many different images. It also makes it easier if you need to run different os' -- do all your os images have drivers for all your hardware?
Granted, in theory OS' should abstract away hardware -- in practice, if you need to change out a few of your mysql instances running GNU/Linux to Microsoft SQL servers for a new project/change in workload -- being able to just spin down the old vms and up the new ones helps a lot in terms of agility.
But yes, it's absolutely possible to provision physical hardware as well.
