Thanks Conor, I laughed pretty heartily when I heard that, too.
With cloud, there's plenty to be cynical about, but it would be a serious mistake to discount cloud in our industry. I think the key to cloud, particularly for small and medium sized hosts, is to take a "fast follower" approach. Keep in mind that you have some huge companies competing in that space, Rackspace, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, the list goes on.
From a consumer perspective, however, a metered cloud is really attractive. You can scale up or down, as needed, quickly and efficiently. Whether you need storage or compute cycles, you only pay for what you use. If deployed correctly and on the right project, it could be an incredible cost savings for people with the right needs...even compared to a $5 a month shared hosting account.
I see it more as an auxiliary service, not so much a hybrid cloud because, let's face it, those are largely BS too. I think something along the lines of a modular server would be ideal and no one has really done that yet.
My two cents.