There was a session at OOW co-hosted by Oracle and Amazon about there testing of Oracle XE on there EC2 service. There where also talking about plans to offer the "real" Oracle database as a service on that platform, but they had no details yet about prices and when it will be available.
BTW, they also showed how you could change RMAN to automatically stream your Oracle database backup to a S3 storage to secure it there.
I also enjoyed reading the "8 things..." a lot. It doesn't always have to be technical. We are doing to much technical stuff anyway. Sometimes we need a relieve.