It wasn't so, in the beginning
I have been working with "Cloud Computing" since 2006. I do not define it as you say, "a poorly defined outsourcing deal" but "the need for ephemeral and elastic resources", with all te tradeoffs associated with that.
When the IDC and the HPs, IBMs and DELLs tell you that everybody is going Cloud, they often mean Hybrid and SaaS.
Now, SaaS is no joke, Salesforce gives a clear SLA, for example. But this has less to do with consultants, more with integrators, and it does not shift that much how IT budgets are spent.
Hybrid or public infrastructure is another story. There is where marketing geniuses abused of the original Cloud innovative model and put some lipstick on the proverbial old pig pretending to sell good old virtualization stacks and a NAS as a Cloud. Don't let me tell the names.
Few of them understand that is not "their" Cloud that will be gaining traction but distributed applications. DELL purchased RNA for sharing memory on the network. You don't need a Cloud for that but expect to see applications take advantage of such "infrastructure patterns"...
Ah, before anybody says that: a Cloud, any Cloud functions only if the sysadmin has a solid technical understanding of very "old-style" tech like SSH, DNS, VLANs or queue messaging. I said solid.