There's a LOT of space between saint and tyrant, and I'd guess that Amazon falls into that space (as almost everybody does).
Regarding your 'Tyrant' arguments:
* EBS sucks and they can't seem to ever fix it
Maybe durable, reliable, cheap and flexible storage isn't that easy to do?
* Beanstalk is a terrible excuse for a PaaS
Haven't used it, so I can't really comment.
* Completely locked into the AWS ecosystem
How so? I mean, they have a few proprietaryish services, but at least from my usage, I haven't found anything that I couldn't replace with something else. SNS? Email. EC2? Dedicated server. Elastic Block? Disks. I haven't used Dynamo, but I got the sense that it was just another NoSQL store?
* Servers can and do go down without notice
EC2 instances are designed to be ephemeral. If you're worried that they are going down, you've probably built your app incorrectly. It isn't meant to be used in lieu of a dedicated server, and it shouldn't be used as such. That's not how their compute units are meant to be used.
* Can't run AWS on premise
They're selling compute time. I mean, sure, they could open source their stuff, but most of their infrastructure is based on open source utilities that you could replace easily. Do we call Dropbox a tyrant for not releasing their source? No. The 'ease of use' is their entire business model.
As to actually answering the question, I like Amazon. I use some of their services where it makes sense to, but I don't think they're the greatest thing ever. They certainly have a good set of utilities, but it doesn't fit every use case.
For small utilization / commodity web needs you've got your typical web hosts. Dreamhost, ASmallOrange, etc.
For slightly larger needs you've got VPSes. Linode, Slicehost, etc.
Slightly larger than that and you're in single dedicated server territory.
For data intensive or computation expensive needs, you've got Amazon.
Bigger than that, and you're on big hardware from (dating myself here) Sun or IBM (and possibly using S3 for storage, because it's bad ass.)