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But the new wave of public cloud computing is not generally running VMWare's product, as it is too expensive; eg EC2 runs on Xen... they are doing better from the private cloud people who are less concerned about using commodity open source software.

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Your assertion that VMware is too expensive is just plain false. The company I work for (Virtacore) offers vCloud Express and we have come to great terms with VMware and our pricing reflects that. While we don't have all the features EC2 offers (because we are only a couple months old and still building out the product) we feel they are extremely expensive. IMO they like to nickel and dime users while we keep it very simple.

In our experience, vSphere is indeed too expensive relative to the value it provides. We ended up much better off implementing a KVM-virtualized cluster that cost us nothing in licensing, allows us to keep Windows out of our cluster entirely, and frees us from fiscally onerous license changes such as the sudden vSphere 5 price increase that spawned this thread.

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