I was about to make a comment similar to this, but this is articulated so much better than what I was able to get out.

I'm in agreement, after the hardware deploy, you're pretty much left with what you would have in a cloud environment: a bunch of VMs (or in this case OS instances) that need care and feeding, and only rarely, much rarely than many would think, do you have to replace a disk, or recable because requirements changed.