That's more on Oracle than Google, and probably unlikely to ever happen at this point. They've already increased licensing costs to make it more expensive to run in other clouds.

You know, that's kind of weird. You'd think they'd be really worried about the general trend and would be introducing smaller, cheaper versions of cloud Oracle. Are they just that convinced that people will stick with Oracle? I wonder what makes them think that. I'm not familiar enough with Oracle to take a guess.

What about running oracle on a google instance with a regional disk? Sure, it's not as sexy as a managed service but functionally it would be very similar.

Not only is it not sexy, it's probably the most work. You're now administering the server, storage & the database; you're the DBA for your Oracle instance and databases; Oracle loves to hammer this scenario for licensing (they'd rather you pay for their "cloud") and paying a premium for the underlying hardware that needs to managed remotely.

I can understand why this is a no-go for the GP.

Yeah, I understand it too; We're currently being squeezed by MS licensing in GCP (but it's basically free in Azure!).

This is the cost of lock-in.

Personally I'd rather have the expertise on staff than pay oracle (and microsoft) for this shitty behaviour.