Just to clarify your answer, here is another thing Google won't tell you: once you build yourself in their cloud you will have to find something else to do with all the time you used to spend on latency.

Why won't Google tell you that?

Oracle is spending way more than 2 billion dollars on its cloud team in an attempt to catch up to AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Would you consider Oracle's cloud endeavor a fair test of how able a company is to reproduce GCP's offering with a fistful of money?

What I can't figure out is why Oracle didn't start down this road 10-20 years ago. They more than anyone should have some ideas about scaling infrastructure for databases.

sales led, not strategic, and it would have cannibalised their existing money printing machine. imagine if they started offering their customers PAYG elastic accounts rather than multi year mega provisioning deals - their numbers would have been destroyed

Oracle is offering external services, that is a huge differentiating factor

But by the time you matched them, they likely would have moved way beyond, with all kinds of new features...