Excellent feedback. I had to click "like" on your post because you really took the time to constructively show what it means for you (you could have easily just tore my head off ). That's the great thing about the community is that VMware can't buy feedback like that, and sales people wouldn't know how to ask.
You bring some great points about the value of using more generic (non-HCL) hardware. You are not alone in this quest. I attended a DevOps meetup in Chicago the other day that blew my mind. (here's the slide deck). Basically one of the views (slide #5) was that the future will not be about this five 9 hardware (i.e. HP, Dell, etc.) it will be about making the applications 999.99% running on three 9 hardware. The apps of the future at scale will be designed for failure. Along those lines I think that supporting the whitebox vision is directly in-line with that approach.