The reason why it wasn't nice was because of the complexity and inefficiency of maintenance. The senior managers who gave me this project wanted to move in that direction in 2010, but couldn't because again, they couldn't get the proper hardware in place in a timely fashion; just delay after delay. Then the Fukushima earthquake happened, which caused an emergency migration of applications from their Tokyo datacenter to their Baulkham Hills datacenter in Australia, which in turn used up all the capacity they were hoping to use for virtualizing everything.

It's not a bad thing if IBM wanted to stay on pure hardware for technical reasons (hey, virtualization can have performance hits, depending on the application). But even IBM didn't want to stay on pure hardware, and that's why it can be considered a sad thing that it took so long.

edit: clarification