I like the way you framed this, its a tradeoff mainly. You can build something fault-tolerant and highly-available, even during AWS outage events, but you have to give up a ton of the product offerings in their suite.

I've managed to stick to EC2/ELB and S3 as passive systems for the vast majority of what we build at my org (~90% of our stack). And for the most part, AWS failures are hitless for us as a result.