I don't use SES, but a quick search led me to this page[0] which suggests they do have an SMTP gateway.
What I'm more curious about is things like deliverability stats (in aggregate and for individual emails), which is the biggest value-add Mandrill provides us right now.
Thanks. Very useful to know. As I mentioned, I never used SES.
I'm sure SES provides great building blocks for something similar to Mandrill. But the value-add of ESP is tying those things together, so one can easily, e.g. search for an email address and find all previous emails sent, the delivery status etc, not to mention a nice web interface...
Open/Click tracking is also quite useful in some cases, and probably isn't supported by SES either(?)