>But with most cloud installations, if you want to go elsewhere, you just pull down the drive image, install elsewhere, and you're done. That's certainly the case with Azure.

I'm a bit weary of the word "install". Most of the time it takes hours, sometime days, plus all the bandwidth to pull down and push up. While getting your physical box takes two visits... this then depends on how far is the farm (in case when you own a physical hosted machine).