I appreciate the humour but economies of scale can't be dismissed...
The article made me laugh but I don't think that you can dismiss "the cloud" concept quite so easily...
Like Andy and Gianni above I date back to the days of CRJE and big IBM mainframes... so all of this has a wiff of "back to the future"... but these days I run Operations for a high volume website (50M pi/month, 3M unique users etc).
And frankly, it's a pain in the a*se!
So if someone can take away the hassle of managing servers, data centres, scalability etc so we can focus on the "value-add" stuff (i.e. the application) with serious economies of scale driving their price point WAYYYY lower than anything we can manage surely it's worth considering?
As I see it it is just another step along the "hosting lifecycle"... people went from their own "corporate data centres" to sticking their servers in "co-lo" to get the higher availability etc, then to "managed services" to outsource the low value nuts&bolts hardware stuff then to "managed application services" to give them even greater focus on the development stuff. "Cloud" is just one step further along.
Sure, maybe the Amazon and Google guys wouldn't know "service delivery" and a meaningful SLA if if slapped them in the face with a fish from the Seattle Fish Market but eventually someone is going to offer this service at a commercial level.
Even Rackspace are already getting into the act - check out Mosso www.mosso.com.
So is "The Cloud" currently whispy cirrus floating in cloud cuckoo land... maybe.
Will it one day be a nice fat cumulo-nimbus raining down compute cycles onto the people who want to focus on developing intellectual property in their applications and not run data centres... definitely.