I've sold and competed against AWS in the last 4 years and you hit the nail on the head. "Someone else to blame" drives a lot of these decisions. It's also important to note, additionally, that AWS has created an excellent marketing machine for their services. I've sold AWS instances to companies that would have been fine with a rack in the closet. But they've heard about the cloud and saw a press release where a competitor was going to "the AWS" and...the checks just write themselves.

As a tech enthusiast I love what's possible with AWS, Azure, GC, etc. As a salesperson I don't mind selling these services (although the margins stink compared to selling VPS or dedicated). But there is a lot of cloud-overkill going on out there.