Google App Engine and others also offer similar PaaS offerings. Yes, they all have similar limitations (and benefits).
Large companies I deal with don't rent physical machines, they buy them and then run a hypervisor platform across them to gain some of the availability benefits of an infrastructure cloud. It costs more, but you lower your risk profile. Many of these companies are looking at migrating their apps to a cloud platform (internal or external) to outsource the hardware / software / infrastructure maintenance. They are mostly interested in IaaS.
I would disagree that renting physical machines is going back to the 2000s considering nearly every large company is doing this.
Just because the trendy hipsters of the internet use the cloud, doesnt mean its modernizing things, and anyone not doing it is a dinosaur.