The low end market is more interesting at Digital Ocean or Linode, and the massive scale stuff feels like Amazon still owns that, so I'm not really sure where Rackspace is fantastic.
If service is what makes Rackspace best in the world, then they need to play that card as hard as they can instead of chasing "markets" like the "open cloud". Chasing markets sort of killed Sun and it could easily kill Rackspace.
It's really not that hard to understand: you choose Rackspace if you want someone to call when you have a question or problem. That's true whether you buy a dinky cloud server or a dedicated network segment with 30 leased boxes. Everything comes with full phone and ticket support now.
If you don't care about that--if you just want some VMs to run your shit--you'll go with DO or Linode on the low end, AWS, Google, or Azure on the high end. Or maybe PaaS like Heroku.
Rackspace has only "lost their mojo" in that they are not a utility cloud provider, which is what Wall Street is hot on right now. But they're a profitable company with good customer loyalty and good technology.
