It seems that my incomplete thoughts are more popular with folks than the one's I take the time to think all the way through and conclude, so here's the next one...
Here it is:
There is a lot of effort being spent now on attempts to craft standards and definitions in order to provide interfaces which allow discrete Cloud elements and providers to interoperate. Should we not first focus our efforts on ensuring portability between Clouds of our atomic instances (however you wish to define them) and the metastructure* that enables them?
/Hoff
*Within this context I mean 'metastructure' to define not only the infrastructure but all the semantic configuration information and dynamic telemetry needed to support such.