A telling aside. Much of what he wants already exists in Google App Engine (and probably in Elastic Beanstalk, too, but I haven't tried it) — sans the need to manage the underlying OS.
Interesting Google is going the other way with Managed VMs running on top of Kubernetes. Perhaps they will meet in the middle somewhere?
It actually works by shipping a docker container to the Google Container Registry (privately scoped to your project), spinning up a "VM" that shows up in your Compute Engine instances list that you can then SSH into if you want (this is why you're both right; they call it Managed VMs, it shows up in your GCE instance list, but they literally are, I think, running your docker container, probably with Kubernetes under the hood).