Hear hear.

I've generally found that hardware has about a 10-month payback aginst AWS, though I've tried to estimate my own (sysadmin) time cost to build out the datacenter, as well as just cash cost.

I'm glad to see someone else is coming to similar conclusions.

Anecdotally, I've found that the big cost is up front, which is why it's daunting many companies to make the change. What I find less comprehensible is the desire to "move to the cloud" from an existing full-stack infrastructure, as if replacing aging server hardware costs more than paying Amazon.