But porting your GAE application to another provider is easy, it won't automatically have the scaling capabilities and the Google login is a problem but mostly they can be easily ported.
yeah it appears doable, it doesn't appear to be googles intent to lock people in (but then I am sure it wasn't the intent of hypercard either).
Its still up to the diligence of the people who write the app. The problem with hypercard, was that the people using the app were the ones that created the cool stuff, and the people maintaining hypercard wouldn't/couldn't keep it going for them.
Actually now that I think about it, because Google is now an OpenId provider, you can probably just accept OpenIds when you port it out of GAE and everything will work fine.
Its still up to the diligence of the people who write the app. The problem with hypercard, was that the people using the app were the ones that created the cool stuff, and the people maintaining hypercard wouldn't/couldn't keep it going for them.