If you do enough queries, you should spend the time to use RCFile for Hive, in which case redshift wont come out _that_ much faster. The point is the 17 hours is not negligible.
That is a good case since customers who typically need a datawarehouse aren't just going to upload data once... they probably are going to upload frequently.
You're missing my point and resorting to sarcasm - very nice </sarcasm>. My point is not that Hive is the better choice because everyone is going to reload their data frequently. My point is that if you want a fair benchmark, don't use an obviously slow data format for Hive. They spent time importing data optimized for RedShift, but they took a very naive approach for Hive. I'm sure RedShift will still be faster, but not 10 times faster.