The wonky pricing on retrieval makes this inordinately complex to price out for the average consumer who will be doing restores of large amounts of data.
The lack of easy consumer flexibility for restores also is problematic for the use case of "Help, I've lost my 150 GB Aperture Library / 1 TB Hard Drive"
The 4 Hour retrieval time makes it a non starter for those of us who frequently recover files (sometime from a different machine) off the website.
The cost is too much for >50 Terabyte Archives - Those users will be likely be doing multi-site Iron Mountain backups on LTO-5 Tapes. After 100 Terabytes, the cost of the drives is quickly amortized and ROI on the tapes is measured in about a month.
The new business model that Amazon may have created overnight though, and beats everyone on price convenience, is "Off-Site Archiving of low-volume low value Documents" - Think Family Pictures. Your average shutterbug probably has on the order of 50 GBytes of photos (give or take) - is it worth $6/year for them to keep a safe offline archive of them? Every single one of those people should be signing up for the first software package that gives them a nice consumer-friendly GUI to backup their picasa/iPhoto/Aperture/Lightroom photo library.
Let's all learn a lesson from [Edit Mat, one t] Honan.
