That's a good point - you could argue it doesn't free you from the need of a good admin, and it actually makes it more difficult to hire someone who knows what

That's a good point - you could argue it doesn't free you from the need of a good admin, and it actually makes it more difficult to hire someone who knows what they are doing; good cloud SA skills are much more rare than good traditional SA skills. When you can just drive to the datacenter and toss in some more disks or drop your new F5 on there (or hack it together with CARP), but instead have to be familiar with exactly what the restrictions and use cases around the cloud providers offerings are; the field of candidates just got painfully smaller, and probably more expensive.