The rise of application-dedicated servers

I always hoped that someone would put into the market a hosting solution that would have made possibile to sell dedicated web applications were the end user had its own application space with its own database: it seems that that day is coming closer, at least looking at the offering from Media Temple, Engine Yard and Amazon.

Coupling some kind of virtual private server or the like with a low enough price and flexible configuration and deployment tools would enable a small software shop to provision dedicated solutions to clients which would not accept having thier data on a shared machine, and would not require a full dedicated server (specially for the management burden associated with it).
Of the three i mention above Amazon EC2/S3 is the one which seems to have the best automation tools (you could easily write a service which automatically deployed the server on behalf of your customers) but it seems to operate at a lower level than the other two.
Engine Yard has nice management tools (albeit without any API it seems) but it seems to offer (too) higher profiles than would be needed (and the prce tag is also higher).
Media Temple Grid Server has the right price and its basic plan features seem ideal for hosting a single application but there is no mention of API support or reseller tools.