You don't have to use the special hardware, it's just faster and easier if you do. And you the customized hardware deal pre-dates the cloud: you can buy the pre

You don't have to use the special hardware, it's just faster and easier if you do. And you the customized hardware deal pre-dates the cloud: you can buy the pre-built racks and have them wheeled into a self-hosted datacenter if you want. That's called ExaData. But if you want to run the DB on your own VMs or bare metal, you can do that. It doesn't have any DRM so from time to time you'll be expected to run some scripts that check your usage and reports back, to ensure you've been paying for what you use. But otherwise it's operationally no different to an open source DB. The open source aspect makes a difference in terms of who you pay for support (if anyone), what quality of support you get, things like that.