My department (information security) was actually just discussing this service this morning at our morning meeting. We've been looking into backup services for our security monitoring appliance beyond our datacenter and DR site. These backups would need to persist for a year according to PCI/SOX compliance, and if we needed to show data to an auditor, we wouldn't need the entire log. In fact, we'd likely not even need 5% of it. Most likely, we'd only need to pull a day (maybe two) from the logs.

I can imagine our media services group talking about the same thing, how to keep master files of their product pictures/videos where they'd only need to grab a file or two here or there (if at all).

Amazon seems to be pushing this as a file dump where retrieval of the files is exceedingly rare. They don't want you to use it as a hard drive, they want you to use it as a magnetic tape drive.