Access control in vpc is strictly more powerful than in ec2 classic, but it also forces you to deal with a lot of stuff you didn't have to in ec2 classic (availability zones, subnets, routing, gateways).

If vpc is "ec2 v2", I would like to see a v3 that allows you to start off with a naive/simple setup and gracefully transition to the complicated setup of vpc when/if you need to.