Comparing something as vast and broadly reaching as "Cloud" is a disengenous comparison to something as specific as a tool like Google Analytics, kind of a wierd comparison IMO. The entire pattern of tech is towards the "cloud" - even if you refuse to use the big ones like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, it's still technically "cloud" if it's managed servers (wherever they may be).
To be honest I never got into the hype behind Google Analytics and I'm glad that I never spent more than 5 minutes at a time dropping the occasional tag on sites I built. (I've also never worked for anyone big enough where the analytics ultimately proved useful or valuable anyway). These tags are now easy to remove by deleting a few lines of code. I really wonder if the larger orgs really should have spent the extra few hours / weeks of development to develop an in house solution all along...