You're completely right. You can get an amazing server in a very good hosting provider at a fraction of AWS. Really. You can get for $200/month a good server in a good hosting that costs literally $5000/month or more on AWS. Azure and Google are not different.

What you don't get is all their regions, easy scalability with EBS, managed services, etc. But all of that has a very high price, and depending on who you are and what you're trying to do, these cloud providers are probably the worst option.