I sympathize with your comment about the excessive level of "as-a-service" products out there. However, I believe we are in a class of IaaS that is justifiably

I sympathize with your comment about the excessive level of "as-a-service" products out there. However, I believe we are in a class of IaaS that is justifiably service-based, because there are performance benefits as we grow to being a worldwide service. So eventually it will be about more than just convenience or business model reasons. The best analogy is a CDN. Fastly is useful even if you understand how to maintain Varnish. We're Fastly for push.