Looks like a good competitor for AWS. I think as a customer it is always good to have some high quality competition amongst the vendors. This will push AWS to try to replicate or better the features being offered by them and also keep them from raising their prices too much.

The list of customers for the joyent cloud looks quite impressive. So this might already have been tested quite thoroughly by these customers and doesn't look like as if it is launching just now.

I think they should introduce a free tier like AWS's micro instance to allow ppl to test drive this new cloud.