Given that google tells you what CPUs they use and that a vCPU is one hyper thread on that CPU, it doesn’t seem proprietary at all. Digital Ocean’s shared CPU plans seem like the ones where you’re unsure what you’re buying. Your thesis might still be valid, but you’ve definitely misled readers about Google’s offering. You’re comparing dedicated resources to shared resources when DO and Linode show you that they have higher prices than what you’ve used for equivalent instances.

Edit: also, you can create custom sized instances so you could have created an 8GB 2 CPU N1 instance for $49.63/mo.