Snap, I was in Austin too! Your friend may have been lucky, the cloud cover maps showed most populated areas covered with Dallas being a notable exception.
My latest example of this was a memory leak in some old software I wrote. It grew linearly with traffic, so it wasn't until traffic randomly spiked that I started seeing problems.
I'd expect the performance to be awful but it still has relatively niche usecases, especially where performance isn't a concern. I'm imagining legacy apps that don't speak S3.
If their progress on GPUs is anything to go by, it will take them at least a decade just to catch up to current DRAM state of the art. And it's not like there was no incentive to build good GPUs for the last 10-15 years.
Of course they could get lucky, or could steal technologies to accelerate things, but I wouldn't count on it happening quickly either way.
Snap, I was in Austin too! Your friend may have been lucky, the cloud cover maps showed most populated areas covered with Dallas being a notable exception.