This feature is currently available for the C3, C4, M3, R3, and T2 instance types running in the US East (Northern Virginia) region; we plan to make it available in other regions as quickly as possible. The instances must be running within a VPC, must use EBS-backed storage, but cannot be Dedicated Instances.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/classiclink-private-communi...
New AWS accounts can't even use EC2 Classic, it's effectively deprecated at this point.
Having this level of control can be nice, but most of it really needs to be optional because for most deployments it does nothing other than add an excessive amount of unneeded complexity.
Some of the APIs are outright hostile, e.g. 'delete_vpc' which makes you track down half a dozen dependencies (without providing hints about which those might be) before you're allowed to delete a VPC.
I've never gotten the impression that AWS is interested in building a 'cloud' for those less technically inclined. Heroku and others fill that void, EC2 is where you move after Heroku doesn't fit the bill and before dedicated hardware does.