Well, if these benchmarks are misguided and useless, it is useful to recognize it as such so you don't go out and trade all your EC2 instances for Linodes.
"At least we're doing something!" is a silly defense.
"At least we're doing something!" is a silly defense.
EDIT: I should probably mention I work at Rackspace, and thus everything I say on this subject should be taken with appropriate grains of sand :)
Many argue that the AWS ecosystem (25 services at last count) and the extensive featureset of AWS outweigh the bare bones "fast" metrics of other providers.
I think like the poster above is mentioning...there is generally more to it than a simple metric or two sampled a few times from a single endpoint. But I guess it all lies on ones definition of what they consider valuable...