t2 instances notoriously throttle way down to 10% if your workload is too consistent. The full performance is quite good from the 2.40 GHz E2676 v3, but at 10% it's worse than a Raspberry Pi. And this will always hit you at the worst time (when under load).

As for the SSDs, they're just GP2 storage, which is an order of magnitude slower than DO and nearly 2 orders of magnitude slower than Joyent Triton.

So AWS is providing a seriously inferior product here, but it's under the AWS umbrella and peers with the rest of their services. The question is: will the target market care about any of AWS's other services enough to make the inferior $/perf worthwhile, and will they integrate easily enough for the average developer to use them?