To be fair, there's also a general purpose option for both AWS and GCE. AWS has the M4 and GCE has the n1, something in the middle for either should be good enough for most applications.
No, m4 (mostly) is a specific architecture. There were things before it like m3.
I'm not saying it's hard to understand what to do when new ones come out, but for each architecture there's a new machine family. GCE has only historically provided n1-whatever and you got whatever CPU platform we had in that specific building.
