Now I've seen everything. The first cloud provider, realizing most of its 'valuable' customers are hybrid-cloud, and are likely to stay that way forever, is going after their on-prem competition. This will not end well for Amazon, but I'm glad they're at least trying. Google is doing the same thing, but is pointing their customers looking for a physical 'as-a-service' offering to HPE. Much more pragmatic move in my opinion.
"Selling the Gateways through the channel means AWS has the muscle to challenge on-prem storage vendors like never before."
^^^ This is a bit of a stretch. Amazon's storage box cannot hold a candle to any existing large storage array. They're decades behind.