I view it as partly an effort to counteract the perceived complexity of running a forest full of separate services. It's fine to say they're all preinstalled in this VM image, but that's still a lot of complexity to dig through: where are the all the servers? What ports are they listening all? Did one of them crash? How do I restart it?
For some users, the VM (or an actual server farm) is indeed the right solution. But this was an attempt to see if I could recapture the "everything's here in this one process (and one code tree)" simplicity for those for whom that's good enough. --scott