Jack, buddy, I have huge respect for you...but I feel I must disagree with your assessment of the blog post being aught but marketing malarkey. The fellow behind that blog post raises some damned good points, especially around bringing workloads back into your on-prem datacenter once you're done.
Cloud bursting with VMware/vCHS isn't great, but it's a heck of a lot better than this Amazon connector allows. Beyond that, to be blunt, VMware has some great next-gen technologies in QA around vCHS that will make cloudbursting easier. I'm sure you've seen the same NDAed slides we all have at this point; it's all an open secret by now.
All of which leads me to: Amazon's move is the desperate one. Bullshitting saved for another day, Microsoft has the best hybrid cloud. This is followed by both companies that have deployed Openstack internally; there are hundreds of Openstack public providers and Openstack to Openstack actually works quite well.
VMware is next up, their technology is immature, but they are dumping amazing resources into it. The people working on the hybrid cloud offering at VMware are some of the brightest on the planet and I promise you they will be at an Azure level by the end of the year. They'll probably pull away from MS and have the best damned hybrid offering (at the highest price!) of all contenders by VMworld 2015.
All of which leaves Amazon, where? As the poster child for voluntarily handing your data to the US government? The embodiment of the inability to even attempt data sovereignty or control over your own workloads in a superficial way? Amazon is great for SaaS developers who make pointless tat or who work in industries where America basically sets global law anyways. (See: Netflix.) It's rather less awesome for the man - many - high-value industries that are either regulated, or where innovation occurs at a such a pace that economic/industrial espionage* is something that companies worry about.
The public cloud isn't safe for some workloads. On-premises isn't cost effective or fast enough for other workloads. That makes hybrids cloud an absolute necessity and it is Amazon - not VMware - that doesn't have a story here.
There are some very valid concerns about picking up your workloads and putting them on a public cloud, regardless of which cloud you choose. But when the workloads can't come back easily, or your VMs are converted, or you are integrating with management tools/using software with weird licensing restrictions then things get a hell of a lot more messy than "this is technically possible."
We could always take our workloads and put them into Amazon's cloud. The thing that was holding us back was never an integration tool. It was all the myriad reasons listed in that blog post, and more besides.
When Amazon develops the ability to truly move workloads from on-prem to the cloud and back again, with conversion headaches, networking issues and management/agent integration tools dealt with on the fly, then VMware should start sweating. Until then, I'm pretty sure that VMware's best path forward is to make a dmaned good hybrid solution of their own...and lower the prices for service providers dramatically.
If they don't, Microsoft is going to win. Microsoft has a hybrid cloud that is not just on-prem and public cloud, it's "service provider"...and that's critical. Data sovereignty means a lot of people want cloudbursting...but only within their own legal jurisdiction. Microsoft has an answer to this. VMware doesn't**.
VMware has about a year, maybe a year and a half to get that sorted before even large enterprises are willing to use the abomination that is SCVMM*** in exchange for a proper multi-teir cloud.
*Ask yourself: if you had the cure for cancer, the formula for room temperature superconducters or the plans for a machine that could cancel gravity in a localized field would you store that information with an American cloud provider? If you would, please e-mail me and we can discuss a fantastic opportunity I have regarding some riverside real estate that provides access for individuals wishing to cross.
**Because most cloud providers won't pay VMware's exorbitant fees and are still miffed that VMware is competing against them.
***Fuck SCVMM.