Still, I agree with the parent's general sentiment re price. The gap used to be much worse, but it's still anywhere from 2x-20x depending on what you're doing.
- EC2 prices are simply high and exclude things like bandwidth.
- The CPUs are usually 1-3 generations behind (they've gotten better with this).
- Virtualization adds overhead (again, this can be very significant if you're doing a lot of system calls)
- IO options are significantly worse
- Their network connectivity is, at best, average
You said it yourself, you're comparing a "terrible" deal to AWS and only saved 20%. Sounds to me like AWS is only 20% better than terrible ;)
On your points about AWS itself I'm not going to argue with as they certainly are valid, however in my specific setup (everything production is c4/r3 types, 1tb gp2 volumes as all volumes, and running network benchmarks to ensure everything is properly sized) I've actually had a pretty big performance gain over dedicated servers in a DMZ behind a hardware firewall.
With regards to the bandwidth, it seems a common issue is when you have very chatty services (Apache Kafka) deployed across multiple AZ's the bill gets real big real fast. Thus far, we're not even cracking 3-digits in bandwidth monthly. Maybe we're simply not at a scale to notice these problems yet.
I just did this migration (non-AWS -> AWS), and we saw a ~20% reduction in monthly prices with 1-year contract at AWS vs. physical hosting (admittedly we were getting terrible pricing with our physical hosts, but still). This will be reduced with the addition of t2.nano servers as we run enough t2.micro instances for little odds and ends that it will put a dent in the bill.