Larry Ellison main argument is that the term cloud doesn't hold any significant bearing.

I beg to differ. A term changes how we see things. Behavior Driven Design, design patterns, anti pattern hinge on that very premise.

Sapir-Whorf hypotesis (Linguistic relativity) states that

there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it.

is 'cloud' the right term to use?

Eventhough it's very succint, cloud computing isn't necessarily the most and accurate depiction of what [x] as a service platform should mean.

But what important here is, the term cloud computing signifies a new higher level of abstraction that differentiate what the internet platform was 10 years ago and the overly abused Service Oriented Architecture.

PS. Thanks for Firman for the question which inspire the writing of this post