I really like the Amazon EC2 environment, and thought I'll spend a bit of time playing around with various types of public (Windows!) AMI servers. But testing has been a bit, well, questionable. Some of my findings:

1. It's very difficult to know what exactly a specific public EC2 image is supposed to be doing. Many images come with little to no information.
2. I can't seem to find the passwords to log onto various windows images. Why are they public if they can't be used!?
3. Lots of images are based on S3, and not EBS backed. This is very annoying, as S3 takes a lot longer to do pretty much anything (stop, image etc.) I am only testing images here, so of-course I don't question the value of S3 for other attributes.
4. The description of what an image does is almost useless and many times confusing.

Have others come across these EC2 issues. Again, my interest was to just play around with public images for testing/experimentation/etc, and therefore these issues may not be too relevant for more normal EC2 deployment uses.