There is a very big difference between a VPS where the vendor places restrictions on many things and retains full root access and our cloud servers were you have total control over the software running on your server and full root access.
Put it another way, if I gave you two servers, one dedicated, one a cloud server in our cloud. If you SSHed in, you wouldn't be able to tell me which was the cloud server and which was the dedicated server based on your control of the server. That's totally different to VPS.
Essentially you are combining the control of dedicated servers with the flexibility and transparency of cloud architecture.