In short, yes. The portals are a wreck. Every time I, or anyone I know, uses it, they are pissed off. It's just needlessly "Metro" and confusing.

It's terribly slow, too. Machines take forever to startup. Their SSD story is a joke (requires special machine types on pre-sized arrays, instead of just a switch). It's far more expensive (2x to 10x GCE last I checked, depending on machine size). The networking is bizarre - all machines in a "service" share an IP. So their recommendation is to put SSH on different ports like 221, 222, 223, to get to a specific machine. Just silly.

I really, really wanted to like Azure; it'd be good for AWS to have real competition. And I am very biased against Google. But GCE is just so superior.

I suppose to see for yourself, try setting up a 3 node SSD Elasticsearch cluster on Azure and GCE. With GCE my experience is that it'll take significantly less time, even if you already know Azure and GCE.