That still doesn't mean that it's a fair comparison. EC2 has plenty of other features out-of-the-box like the ability to manage security groups, VPNs, elastic IPs, easy access to other AWS offerings like SQS and S3, the ability to treat images and the machines they're running on as independent, multiple locations, etc.etc.
Yes you can have all these things outside of the cloud, and yes you might not need any or all of them. (EDIT: and yes using their services means you're locked-in to some degree.) Still, I maintain my original point which is that you can't really say that Hetzner is X times cheaper based purely on the hardware specs, disregarding the fact that EC2 is much more than just a bunch of virtual machines.
