It looks like the Multi-AZ setup is using block level replication such as DRBD instead of the built-in replication:
> Database updates are made concurrently on the primary and standby resources to prevent replication lag.
Makes me feels better for setting up my own pg cluster on EC2 a week ago, which does allow reads from the replication slave. Plus, I can provision <1000 IOPS (provisioned IOPS is damn expensive with AWS), and get to use ZFS.