> Running ECS is cool and all, and I know they do some container-specific VM optimizations, but I still know I'm running a kernel on a kernel, even if my VMs happen to share a host.

The cloud is great for distributed systems, and for these the "kernel on a kernel" cost becomes insignificant with the additional power allowed by the horizontal scalability of letting multiple computers talk over a network (not to mention network latency).

I'd be willing to bet that running on absolute bare metal is a sort of niche market in cloud computing that Amazon considers too small to get into.