Very true.. But often it's the service providers that think about these hard problems daily, talk to their customers, and attempt at making the world a better place by building great products. In the process it's really hard not to form opinions about the future. :)
Disclosure: I work for Iron.io
I've found you can get very far on those four points (minimal configuration, accessible, collaborative, and minimal production-development gap) using shared virtual images, specifically using Vagrant. It's probably not a good solution if you require massive amounts of test data in development, but unless that's the case I just don't see the benefits of using SaaS components for development's sake.