Yes, I guess if what you want is to build software from source, then the ports are not THAT bad; but when you want to get a little more generic or care about deployment time (especially when dealing with cloud instances) then the fun goes away. Plus the rolling release nature of the ports sucks arse..
I'm not advocating against FreeBSD, I like FreeBSD and I want to see it again on the table, but the ports are hurting it and its adoption, it needs to go away.
You are quite correct that installing from source doesn't really scale in hosting services. It does take too long and leads to incongruent deployments that may block migration. I don't believe any distribution is well suited for cloud deployment out of the box. I usually deploy from a suite of prepared images via netboot, then customers are free to compile from source or use canned packages.
I'm not advocating against FreeBSD, I like FreeBSD and I want to see it again on the table, but the ports are hurting it and its adoption, it needs to go away.