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A lot more expensive. There will be no comparison in cost, or at least that is the wrong comparison to be making.

I'm not sure if I'm reading ethereum right, but it sounds a lot like mesh computing, where a user can bid for unused cycles on a bunch of networked computers, or one "world computer" if you agree with the author's characterization.

If that is correct, then ethereum and Amazon spot instances could be interchangeable - low availability, but potentially lower cost due to the bidding process if there is a lot of excess compute power on the network.

Sorry, thats not correct. The only person who gets compensated for performing computations are the miners. Everyone else performs computation so they can have an up-to-date blockchain, but are not compensated.

Ethereum is the most expensive computational environment you can imagine. However, it is also the highest trust. Its not for computationally-limited (gaming/data analysis) its for trust-limited (financial applications/privacy)

There is an effort to build a computation market on top of Ethereum, but the computation happens off the chain.

https://github.com/pipermerriam/ethereum-computation-market

For some reason I thought Ethereum was different than a flavored blockchain, but I guess it's just the branding/dev ecosystem that is different.

That's completely inaccurate. Ethereum runs the same piece of code on all these computers in the world. That means a program which is being run on the network when it has 500 computers isn't any faster than a program which is being run on 50 computers.

The benefit you get is this: When 500 computers are running it, then you know you can trust the execution and the 'state' of the virtual machine when it is only being run on 50 computers (or 1 in case of a centralized application).

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