I still think that's a bit "rewriting the history". E. G. Vmware enabled fast self-provisioned VMs and nobody called them cloud. Heck in 1999ish or so, while at university and way before I was an IBMer, I could sign up to some ibm development program as a student, get an account, and provision Linux VMs on mainframe.

Not to say your scenario isn't valid and real, but I live that scenario every day today with in house cloud and virtualization too - it takes months of approvals and solutioning and security assessment and network engineering and procurement and costing and whatnot... To deploy a windows vm.