Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what you're saying is the mattress is better or that the mattress is a false analogy? I'm happy to pay a premium to not have to worry about the countless things that AWS deals with. Whenever people complain about AWS having downtime I have to wonder how sure they are that their uptime track record would be better.
While you're waiting in line at the slow bank because that's the bank you've used for years, you're ignoring the bank across the street with no line, cheaper fees, and 80% of the same services you need and will use the most.
An app I am running uses ec2, s3, sqs, ses, rds, swf, elb, elasticache, cloudfront, cloudwatch, route 53, and opsworks. Take any of those out and you give me a potential headache, time sink, or out-of-scope responsibility. It all just works and while I am sure I could save as much as 50% by going cheap and rolling it all myself, my time is valuable, I'd have worse uptime, and with proper reservation of resources my aws bills are, in relative terms, marginal.