Ah, interesting. I wrongly assumed the SoftLayer bare metal servers might be closer to EC2's bare metal offerings where, from the outside, you're given the same

Ah, interesting. I wrongly assumed the SoftLayer bare metal servers might be closer to EC2's bare metal offerings where, from the outside, you're given the same set of management tools as a VM, and from the inside, a fairly limited hardware surface area is exposed to you.