I beg to differ, I am a systems engineer for a Fortune 500 retailer, and my team has been waiting weeks, and have been told it will be some time next year, for some vmware instances we need.

That being said, not every organization is as dysfunctional.

I think the best approach would be a hybrid one, where developers could spin up instances in the "cloud", and ops would migrate them into the main infrastructure when it made sense to do so.