Not quite, because what you're paying for in AWS for instance is not just the nice box (and AWS glue like IAM), but abstracting away all the annoying hardware stuff you'd have to deal with yourself if you went box-free.
Particularly, it's a lot easier to scale hard up and down (and thus better align your infrastructure spending with the actual demand) in the cloud than it is with on-prem hardware. So cloud providers are billing for that convenience and flexibility because maintaining all that hardware and providing the glue between the services becomes their problem.
I'm not really AWS's biggest fan (I go full self-hosted on my personal projects and when I must use AWS for work I'm careful to avoid vendor lock-in), but neither do I think it's fair to characterize them as just putting pencils in a box.
You make a pencil.
Someone takes your pencil, and puts it in a really nice box with some other pencils.
People use those pencils to draw a $10 million picture.
The box maker uses contracts to ensure they get a 10% cut of that picture sale.
Actual pencil makers gets no cut.
I can see why this would annoy pencil makers, no matter how nice the box is, or how much effort they put into sales. At a societal level it seems incentives are slightly out of wack too.
Personally, I'd rather see all the money go to the artist than add more levels of ownership, control and cuts, especially if the inputs are non-rivalrous.
The classic economics example is lighthouses, we all benefit from the non-shipwrecked ships bringing goods to market but feel like the merchants should probably contribute to their construction via taxes rather than rely on randomly charitable lighthouse builders (see: Public Goods)