Is it though? Eventually the ec2 costs will outstrip your savings on the macbook. $1500 a year ish for a reserved m4.large w/ 2 vCPU and 8G ram which seems about comparable. That math doesn't work unless you're buying a new macbook every 2 years.
edit: This bit is interesting though:
If you’re running in AWS the auto-hibernate feature will stop your instance shortly after you stop using your IDE. This can be a huge cost savings over running a more permanent developer desktop.
If you use this for your day job (and you don't maintain crazy hours...), you'll be running ~180 hours per month on average. That's $17.28/mo or $207.36/yr for an m5.large. You can save a few bucks with a t2.large, but I think < $20/mo is something most businesses can cover (again, assuming this is for your day job).
You can also manually hibernate your instance once you are done with the work for the day. I also suspect you won't need anything like a m4.large for most dev environments but i see that you wanted some equivalent to a macbook pro, so that makes sense.
This assumes you do no work outside of that slim vertical, experimenting with different languages for others sorts of projects, etc.
But sure, if that is your life, or your very strict work life, I guess it can work fine. Would never be able to work for me since I tinker with so much random shit.
Remote gaming just still isn't there yet imo. Anything multiplayer has enough latency/unreliability issues as it is. Even gaming over WiFi as opposed to a wired connections will create all kinds of problems. I wouldn't want to introduce yet another variable into that.
edit: This bit is interesting though: If you’re running in AWS the auto-hibernate feature will stop your instance shortly after you stop using your IDE. This can be a huge cost savings over running a more permanent developer desktop.
So perhaps the cost is quite a bit lower.