I agree it makes no sense for consumer-targeted production. I have played with the pi and run a small robot to collect intermittent data from twitter and store

I agree it makes no sense for consumer-targeted production. I have played with the pi and run a small robot to collect intermittent data from twitter and store it on Mongo, which I can remotely access using the web service. At the same time, I would not want to go all the way to the cloud for such a small thing. I guess it depends on the use-case.