I'm hoping someone with Rackspace Cloud experience can pipe in, but at a glance, it looks like a more bare-metal offering, like EC2, where you have to worry about more of the low-level concerns. Thoughts?
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/server...
So, the real point is that even if this wasn't apparent to you the customer, the substantial differences between Cloud Servers and Slices was branding and different pricing models; the support teams were also separate (and the two front-line support teams have different "styles"). Otherwise, behind the scenes, they're literally the same thing -- in terms of data centers, hardware platforms and hypervisors, etc., etc.
The email left me concerned of the transition and what it would mean for uptime of websites, but if it's literally just a change of billing, branding, and control panel, why are they waiting months and months to change this? If it doesn't affect my websites' uptimes or IPs, they should just rip off the bandaid now.
That said, my needs are fairly simple. The most complex thing I've had to do is provision additional IPv4 addresses on one of the servers (for SSL hosting), and a support person did that for me in under 10 minutes via their web-based chat support.
Unless you have a site that will actually use the gobs of bandwidth that Slicehost or Linode includes (and I don't), then Rackspace Cloud will end up being cheaper.. My single-IP servers cost me between $11 and $15 per month on average, based on bandwidth used.