This is not the first time I've heard this argument from a "cloud services provider", and surely it won't be the last. I've found you can get very far on those

This is not the first time I've heard this argument from a "cloud services provider", and surely it won't be the last. I've found you can get very far on those four points (minimal configuration, accessible, collaborative, and minimal production-development gap) using shared virtual images, specifically using Vagrant. It's probably not a good solution if you require massive amounts of test data in development, but unless that's the case I just don't see the benefits of using SaaS components for development's sake.