A short criticism of Amazon SQS

I looked at the API for SQS a long time ago after writing this:

http://www.rockstarprogrammer.org/post/2008/oct/04/what-matt...

I really felt like I must be missing something. This made no sense to me. The linked article suggests the author is also missing something, or Amazon just did it wrong. I don't know where I'd actually use SQS.

I'm glad I'm not alone in making this observation. From where I stand, it sure seems like your could build a functional equivalent (or better) by just using a database table for the queue and be done with it.