It always does...now, do you deploy your own LAMP stack or do you let someone else handle that? Being able to set up your own environment/stack without someone doing it for you is a plus (even if company policy is that someone SHOULD do it for you) that you should be listing!
I've set up my own local dev environment on a couple machines. If you're talking about a dedicated server, I haven't ventured there yet. In due time, though, I will.
When one of those providers runs a deal then get it. If you don't want to have to shop deals then DigitalOcean is a good idea. I have trust issues with Linode so I can't recommend them anymore, and frankly, some of their guides are terrible.
You should be reading the documentation of the software as provided by the vendor of the software along with the docs of your distribution before you attempt any guide because quite often the guides will have you do something that won't work, is suboptimal, or just plain wrong. nginx has an entire section of their wiki dedicated to bad configurations from guides on the Internet and what you should be doing instead: http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls
Understanding the full stack and being able to build it from scratch and tweak it gives you a competitive advantage over people who cannot, and that makes you look better to employers.
It depends on what you use EC2 for. The experience I'm talking about isn't "with Linode". The experience is with taking a distribution that has none of the parts of the typical LAMP stack installed and installing and configuring them properly for the solution that you are providing.
Now experience with EC2 in provisioning many machines of the same configuration using something like Puppet or Chef is a related but separate thing, and is also good to have, but you have to be able to walk before you can run.
