I think you make a great point about the AWS brand. I notice a lot of startups using it because everyone else does, not because they have shopped around to find the best fit for their company.
Using the standard/dominant solution is not a bad way of making a choice in a market that is still uncertain and not stable. When there is so much uncertainty, it is not about which cloud provider is going to give me more performance or capacity per dollar, but which one is going to be around a couple of years from now or going to evolve to meet your needs. AWS just keeps churning out new services and functionality while everybody else tends to be stuck on basic starting/stopping/resizing VMs functionality
