I'm one of the founders of Overleaf [1], and we've taken the route of keeping the full power of LaTeX there for anyone that needs it, but providing a 'Rich Text mode' [2] overlay for those who prefer a less code-like experience. If you give it a try, let us know what you think!
(Note - we work in the same office as figshare, so this is probably a biased recommendation!)
I actually had quite a lot of fun figuring out how to get everything working in the cloud. Set up my home desktop as my personal computer "cluster" (i5 processor, so a cluster of 4 cores!), I find it hard to work in an environment that I tend to do other stuff besides work in. Derived a small representative dataset from the massive one I had to quickly iterate over my analysis scripts in Cloud9 (while having github take care of my revision history). Then ssh'ing into my desktop PC whenever I needed to run the scripts on the full data set.
I considered adding a section on open science and cloud-based software to my thesis, but in the end decided not to due to a lack of time. Open science is based on open source principles, where everything that can be shared should be shared. The Cloud VM angle is quite interesting in this sense, as being able to share the machines that software for a research project was ran on is often quite difficult (or nigh impossible), and a cloud-based VM seems to bridge this gap somewhat. In theory, anyone could log-in to the VM and play around in the workspace I set up for my thesis project, not that many would want to I suppose.