I split my time between managing a few racks worth of servers at one company, and an AWS setup at another client. The amount of ops work per server/instance is higher for the AWS client than it is for the company I manage physical racks for. That's despite the fact I do physical cabling and racking of equipment as necessary.

The issue is that there are so many aspects of the AWS infrastructure that takes extra effort because we don't have full control. E.g. we can stuff whatever disk subsystem we want in the servers and not have to work our way around the lack of any truly fast disk subsystems in EC2. So for every day I don't physically move serves, I spend 3-5 working around AWS limitations.

I agree with you with respect to what you want, but we're taking baby-steps today - AWS is way too expensive for most people to move to it, even before you factor in the ops complexities.