bit twiddler
Your article makes no sense on so many levels, I don't know where to begin. The App Engine team built it to open up the power of the Google infrastructure to the outside world. That's what it does. The power of the Google infrastructure does not include Drupal, open source e-mail systems, MySQL, etc. Google would be a joke of company if it did. As you mention, their infrastructure includes BigTable, GFS, etc -- the basic tools that make their infrastructure the most scalable in the world. You don't know if App Engine scales? What better proof could one have of scalability than an architecture that actually powers the two largest sites on the Internet. Sure, App Engine is a wrapper around that infrastructure, but the infrastructure is where all the real work happens. App Engine fulfills its goal of opening up their infrastructure in an astoundingly easy to use way. As an earlier commenter mentioned, its focus is completely different from Amazon's.
You need to find better people to interview, and you need to think in a more nuanced way about this issue. Lumping everything into "the cloud" and comparing clouds based on some disjointed idea of openness just doesn't make a lot of sense.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
