This is pretty close to where I assumed the VMW/SS would be going and I think it is a good thing. At my previous gig we did something along the same lines – conceptually. They actually had a pretty nice process and set of tools for deployment of apps/sites/etc within operations – with proxies in the configuration for such things as DB URLs/passwords and such. So yes, this is definitely needed/used in the operations world, not to mention in the dev world (it would be nice to have various PaaS setups for debugging/testing/etc. before deployment).

As a dev I don't get into the deployment/ops world much, my previous gig being the closest I came – but I imagine there are some solutions out there already that address at least some of this. That said, it is always good to have more choices, even better would be to have a standard as Guo mentioned. The impl doesn't have to be open, but the standard should be – it will be adopted faster and an ecosystem will grow up around it so that other modules can interact and as you mentioned you can move from one to the other. Then whether someone goes with a given impl will not depend on vendor lockin (which most of us hate – especially Java devs), but on the quality of the impl.

Good luck – I look forward to seeing what comes out of this even though it doesn't directly affect me.