I feel like you're making an orthogonal statement related to cpu usage and the wait/spin settings for "cloud hardware".
CPU usage has no baring on transactions per second. So why are you bringing it up.
Spin/wait settings: how is "cloud hardware" different than "legacy hardware"? Both are servers located in a data center. Furthermore, the blog post goes to say that if you aren't running any other non-erlang services (you box is dedicated to Erlang) that you should KEEP the default setting of spin/wait since it won't cannobalize other services running on that box ... which is exactly how these benchmarks were tested.
The fact of the matter is, Erlang had lower transactions per second than most of the languages benchmarked. My insight from this HN discussion is that where Erlang shines is having consistently low latency/response time. It's not the fastest, but it's the most consistent even under load.