Sounds like they're allowing people to treat the systems as "infrastructure" and "applications" with only the infra having exposed APIs? That's super common in software of all sorts. There are a lot of people who can make good use of a decent API and appreciate it, but are not experienced (or smart, or have time, etc) enough to design a good API themselves. Most software is mortar, not bricks.
Most all of the time wasting or hacky things like this there are just because people don't have time to improve things they scraped together to provide value somewhere.
Everyone at AWS ran around with their heads cut off back when there were 6 regions because everyone was so overworked or had to drop everything they were doing for a week because a new Xen bug was published to the email list and would go out of embargo at the end of the week. I can only imagine how insane it is now with ~20 regions to support.
