On the other hand, building everything "cloud native" can also enable some things that are very difficult to achieve otherwise. One thing that comes to mind is decoupling storage and compute, where you can use auto-scaling for the compute parts: great for OLAP / data-warehousing types of problems.

Regardless, I don't consider it merely a "useful starter" -- there are many mature businesses for which IT is not their core competency but still need to deal with complex architectures, and the cloud is very attractive to them.