I'm not so sure it's astroturfing in this case... I haven't done much with GCE, but the UX does seem to be better than AWS and Azure. AWS is just horrible, and some of the defaults while more secure make less sense often enough. Azure seems to have similar options, with a less horrible UX, but still not great.

Though if you're using Ansible or another management system that's scripted over the top, it makes less of a difference. I will say that some of the hosted services (data in particular), Azure is really nice... Azure Storage Queues/Tables are solid and Azure SQL is easiest to get a grasp on setup/cost of the three.

That said Google Cloud is better in terms of compute with docker containers.

I work for a Microsoft partner, so certainly not astroturfing. I just really don't care for Azure. Though, today's announcement re: Bash shell in the browser for Azure is certainly a step in the right direction for usability.