Is this a story about virtualization? I fail to see the distinction between data center and private cloud in this context.
Traditional virtualized hosting environments typically also come with varying levels of technical overheads when setting up new boxes.
What bofa have is a virtually self-service (some business approvals needed) user interface with the ability for devs to set up new virtual servers with little/no knowledge of the underlying hosting infrastructure.
cloud - someone else's computers
private cloud - someone else's computers that you own???? or that nobody else uses, but in this context you also own???
Private cloud usually refers to that same abstraction layer. Hardware provisioning is abstracted away from use and available on-demand from a pool, and likewise deployment works automatically via the same or an equivalent API.
That's very different from the operation of a typical company-owned datacenter from a couple of decades ago.