My general take on their writeup was that they have too many services that depend on EBS working. They should try to find ways to decouple critical services like loadbalancers and Amazon RDS from EBS.
To your point, w/o knowing architecture, seems like ELB run state could likely be on ephemeral storage (if ELBs are EC2 instances) backed by configs on S3 unless run state is crucial across resets. If not instances, maybe use S3 directly, or ElastiCache.
That said, I agree with you. I commented similarly during the outage, noting that AWS may have too many interdependencies: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4685571