I think Sam's comment is important:

>Note it is important to have full perspective on costs here...

All too often I see the "AWS is too expensive" circlejerk devolve into a flat cost argument.

It is absolutely more expensive in that regard.

That being said, I see very few comparisons that take in to account all of the engineering effort saved by some of the AWS feature set.

There are non-trivial things that simply aren't a problem anymore on AWS, and time can be spent on actually interesting/difficult problems.