Re: And this is why
Personally, I think the purported reduction in IT costs across the board needs closer examination as well. Sure, if you have an environment with a lot of Dev/Test and/or a lot of scalable production load, it's great for spinning servers up and down.
For constant enterprise loads, I think the costs look different, especially these days when it's easy to rent tin in a bitbarn near your premises.
Of course, these days, the big vendors are trying to drive customers to their SaaS offerings, with all the drawbacks you describe (but marketing hype the business users fall for).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
