TF is way behind on UI, which is why it's making Keras its front-end. It's fairly slow on multi-GPUs compared to Torch and neon. It might pull ahead in performance on GCE, but that's just for lockin.
TF is in a fortunate position of having several UIs at this point. It's a lower level framework with a lot of power. If you don't need all that power, Keras or TFLearn or Slim are pretty great. If you do, it's there for you. I see no evidence that Google's goal with TF is to lock you into anything, and especially GCE. I'm a former Google employee, and I can tell you unequivocally — that's not how Google actually works.