I was involved in the alpha for QiuckSight and found it interesting. My feeling is that Amazon realizes that there is a market for data visualization and analysis for RDS, Redshift, S3 flat files, etc. There are many players in this space as well as traditional BI companies like Tableau.

QuickSight is going to be leveraged for more than just data analysis. They'll (probably) be using this for cost exploring and other features down the road (ELB Log Analysis, VPC Flow Log Analysis).

There are several limitations that I ran into. If you want to use a Redshift cluster as a data source it has to be a) publicly accesable and b) you have to whitelist the QuickSight IP range. QuickSight is launched in Amazon's infrastructure (their account and VPC) and that places limitations on what can be accessed (no VPC peering).

As an operations engineer, my biggest feedback was "let me launch my own QuickSight resources in my own VPC". Don't get me wrong, the fact that you get an AD instance, SPICE DB, and Web UI at a button click is nice, but I want to have more freedom to control and secure it. Just my two cents.