Thinking of it that way for single-node configurations (or static collections of multiple nodes) makes sense, yes.

A lot of the promise of GCE and GCP generally come from on-demand scalability, autoscaling, serverless, etc. Those become much more relevant as projects scale from a small set of fairly static resource requirements to larger and more dynamic usage. Take a hypothetical online retailer -- they might need few hundred cores at night while their users are asleep, a few thousand during the day, and tens of thousands on, say, black Friday. GCE lets you do that kind of scaling as-needed rather than having to provision far in advance (although there are pricing advantages if you can commit to cores and RAM over the long term).

(note: I work on GCE)