Nice idea. I do a lot of my development SSHing to a resource rich VPS. For things that take a long time to run (Haskel stack builds, a long running machine learning calculation, etc.) it is great to not run that stuff on a laptop.

Cloud Shell is a bit different in the sense you would not want to try anything resource intensive on a micro instance. But for coordinating other services it makes sense.

I think Google needs to add one more thing to their cloud development toolkit: a public version of something close to their cider web based IDE that gives you access to work with any code you have in you private Google-hosted git repos, AppEngine and VPS services. nitrous.io has something like this, and I think that Google would do well to offer something similar for using the public version of their infrastructure.