I'm honestly curious if 3rd party cloud pricing can allow competition that makes business sense, though. Maybe someone will attempt it..
As for the terminal, it is constantly evolving. Change takes time :) Mess with something that works and you might not like the outcome. Just ask Netflix ;)
I think it makes sense because someone can start an operation with few clients and limit infrastructure costs. As the number of clients grows, you can improve your infrastructure. By the time you get to thousands of customers, you can switch to bare-metal servers and dramatically improve your bottom line.
In other words, you don't need a big machine, expensive colocation, upfront bandwidth costs, just to serve two clients.
It's not a big enterprisey mish-mash if that's what you're thinking :) Everything has its place. Flash is used for the animated ipanels just because it is easier for the designers to use. (It also is used for IB video chat because of its easy hookup to the webcams installed on the box.) Silverlight is used for all the TV streaming because the live video streaming is built on top of WM smooth streaming tech. .NET is used as a hosting environment for bits and pieces such as the Bing maps integration. It is also how apps such as our dev IDE are run. I can log into any terminal anywhere in the world and run any of our internal stand-alone apps without admin rights. (And via any browser using BBA to login.)
As for the terminal, it is constantly evolving. Change takes time :) Mess with something that works and you might not like the outcome. Just ask Netflix ;)