However, I've been closely observing this space for the last 2 years (from both: infrastructure engineer and application developer perspectives) and I'm a bit disappointed with the current state of art.

Unfortunately, majority of the existing PaaS providers are "cloud" equivalents of "one-click installers" and/or "managed hosting" from the web 1.0 era... Pretty much all what they are doing boils down to daemon installation and provisioning. They are also charging for unused (but allocated) resources, which should be forbidden in the cloud era.

Of course, there are some exceptions :) Two of them being:

- Google App Engine - pricing per CPU-time and bandwidth usage, with horizontal auto-scaling based on request rate. But they took it a bit too far with their Datastore, to the point that you need to write apps taking it into account from the beginning.

- SQL Azure - highly available and fault tolerant version of SQL Server.