I don't think you can discount them like that. Maybe they aren't as front of mind as services like S3, EC2, etc, but if you were to try to rebuild your setup in a personal data center, replacing the capabilities of VPC, IAM, CloudTrail, NAT gateways, ELBs, KMS etc would be a huge effort on your part. The fact that they are "basic building blocks" makes them more important, not less. In a discussion about the complexity of cloud providers versus other setups, that seems especially relevant.