Working on a project right now that will deploy on Azure Platform (not VMs). It's pretty nice to be able offload the OS to a third party and just deploy your app bits, knowing they're going to take care of OS, patching, and in general, server management tasks.
On the VM side, they're still catching up, I think. For instance, you can't get multiple IPs routing to a single VM, so if you have multiple SSL sites, you'll need multiple servers in general. (SNI isn't available on IE for XP which is a deal breaker for many people.)
But that's probably a reflection more of the mindset of people wanting dedicated servers and thinking "cloud VM" is the same thing, instead of people trying to build distributed applications.
On the VM side, they're still catching up, I think. For instance, you can't get multiple IPs routing to a single VM, so if you have multiple SSL sites, you'll need multiple servers in general. (SNI isn't available on IE for XP which is a deal breaker for many people.)
But that's probably a reflection more of the mindset of people wanting dedicated servers and thinking "cloud VM" is the same thing, instead of people trying to build distributed applications.