In other words they took a system targeted especially at people who needed on-demand computing and as it got popular, adapted it to the needs of the 24/7/365 web-hosting by offering an alternate pricing model, point-and-click user interfaces and additional features and services like EBS and CloudWatch.
The point is absolutely not that EC2 never evolved beyond its initial use case and isn't good at other things.
The point is that while they have 24/7/365 hosting services, there's never been any reason to expect that they would be better at it than anyone else. So why do we continue to see blog posts about not liking EC2 with vague complaints about the horrible price-to-performance ratio getting lots of upvotes?
Because EC2 still seems to be a lot of people's default option for 24/365 servers, even though it isn't particularly good for it. Why is that so? Evidently there haven't been enough blog posts on the subject yet!
The point is absolutely not that EC2 never evolved beyond its initial use case and isn't good at other things.
The point is that while they have 24/7/365 hosting services, there's never been any reason to expect that they would be better at it than anyone else. So why do we continue to see blog posts about not liking EC2 with vague complaints about the horrible price-to-performance ratio getting lots of upvotes?