I guess it sort of could be, but I'd consider a "cloud" service something where you either a) can spool up or shut down servers dynamically from an image without any additional configuration (ala EC2 or Heroku), or b) a commodity service like Amazon S3 or MongoHQ where you pay by usage and they handle resource allocation.
I see scriptability and automation through an API as important to 'cloud' classification too. Good point about the automatic resource allocation, I think that's actually the key. On Linode you're paying for a segment of a specific machine, more like a dedicated server than EC2.
