There are probably others much more familiar with cloud infrastructure who can chime in, but the AWS of science and the Heroku of science are two very different challenges, and I feel the analogies probably cross over pretty well.
Definitely having the infrastructure 'warehouse' layer that Transcriptic is building (with a real API! wow!) will be valuable. And like you hint at, power users won't need hand-holding, but 99% of the market of users will. That's where packaging, ease of use, and limited configuration seem to be the difference maker (Heroku starting exclusively with Rails).
