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While undeniably true, you have to look at the levels of redundancy. With a dedicated server, if the box dies you're offline, if the storage dies you may lose data, etc.

Plus, there's also a premium just for access to the ecosystem/APIs. You are often paying for the theoretical convenience of being able to spawn additional instances programmatically.

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Absolutely true - however, in a true "apples to apples" comparison, if you're only running a single EC2 instance (for example) and it dies you're offline as well - AWS does not "automatically" have a failover setup for you. In this case 2 dedicated instances with a load balancer is going to get you the same setup you'd get on AWS (only likely cheaper and a lot more powerful setup).

Like someone else said, your VM can die as well, the cloud provides some HA services but there are hosted/standalone versions as well. I think the real question is how spiky is your usage, even with renting bare metal you still can't scale dynamically like you can with cloud VM - if you need 5x the capacity to cover spikes you might as well use cloud and all the fancy stuff you get with it.

And you can use both at the same time (dynamically scale up through cloud, bare metal predictable workloads)

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