Ooh, love the question!

Larry Ellison main argument is that the term cloud doesn't hold any significant bearing.

I beg to differ. A term changes how we see things. Behavior Driven Design, design patterns, anti pattern hinge over that very same premise.

Sapir-Whorf hypotesis states that "there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it".

Now the question is: is 'cloud' the right term to use? Eventhough it's very succint, cloud computing isn't necessarily the most and accurate depiction of what [x] as a service platform could mean. But what important here is, the term signifies a new higher level of abstraction that differentiate what the 'internet' platform is 10 years ago nor the overly abused term SOA.