That's actually not a joke. Oracle liked to argue you should accept server licences as being a fraction of your budget, so when it went up you'd automatically pay them more.
Amazon actually does allow SQL Server. The poster saying it probably didn't was influenced by the fact that Azure, Microsoft's own cloud solution is an AWS competitor.
To your own points:
SQL Server is as proprietary as Oracle
SQL Server is cheaper than Oracle
SQL Server is being ported to Linux in 2017 :)
Amazon.com seems to strongly encourage the companies it acquires to use aws. Apparently, woot.com is fixing to rewrite the website in Java or something just so they do not have to use Windows. Apparently, it makes sense to them.
* SQL Server is proprietary
* SQL Server licenses are expensive
* SQL Server runs only on Windows (or least used to?)