While you're right that EC2 is pretty close the metal, dotCloud starts at a very different level of abstraction. On most VPS providers (as with dedicated hosting) the first question you answer when you go to deploy your web app is "what Linux distro do you want to run?" If you're trying to learn sys admin skills, that's great, but for most people, the end goal is to deploy a web app, not run a Linux box.

With dotCloud, you start higher up: list the components (eg Python web frontend, MySQL and Redis) that make up your actual application, push your code and you're handed back a URL with your app running. A single command lets you scale out for reliability, with load balancing across your multiple web front-ends and master-slave replication for your databases. Running a single physical server? Sure, not that hard. Setting up reliable, automated failover for every component in your stack? That's a bit more work.

In the end, it's really a question of the value of your time. Can you do all your own sys admin work? Sure. You could also build and maintain your own hardware, but from the sounds of it, you've decided that work is worth outsourcing Hetzner.

In the same way, for a lot of people, wasting time administering servers is just time taken away from building a real business: a distraction that is worth paying a few extra dollars a month to make disappear.