So one EC2 server might be drasticatlly slower than a raspberry pi, but isn't part of the attractiveness of cloud services like EC2 that there's replication and load balancing with no headaches? now if you build a modular, distributed load balancing replicated network of 10~20 raspberry pis, that all outperform the EC2 servers... that might warrant replacing EC2 with raspberry pis.
That actually sounds like a pretty awesome project... I might do that some day.
It's only drastically slower because the micro instance gets very heavily throttled when you put it under sustained load. If you use it for what it's designed for the performance is much better as you don't get throttled with light usage. The benchmark is of the slowest ec2 instance type while being heavily throttled due to the benchmark generating too much load.
That actually sounds like a pretty awesome project... I might do that some day.