re 3) I'm not sure specifically what happened in your case, but generally servers are provisioned and online in the public cloud within a few minutes -- If I had to guess, its possible the huddle you were in had some kind of capacity issue or other fault that prevented immediate provisioning. If you ever boot a server and its not online in <5 minutes, I'd go straight to support chat, and they generally can tell you what is going on.
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(disclaimer, I work at Rackspace via the Cloudkick acquisition)
re: 2) There is a product called RackConnect, which can bridge the public cloud which has API based provisioning, and physical servers: http://www.rackspace.com/hosting_solutions/hybrid_hosting/
re 3) I'm not sure specifically what happened in your case, but generally servers are provisioned and online in the public cloud within a few minutes -- If I had to guess, its possible the huddle you were in had some kind of capacity issue or other fault that prevented immediate provisioning. If you ever boot a server and its not online in <5 minutes, I'd go straight to support chat, and they generally can tell you what is going on.