Obama told people they shouldn't just use an app, they should build one. I've taken plenty of web dev and programming courses (including a couple of university courses), but still have doubts about my ability to build something production-ready on my own.
Encouraging people to play with code and telling them they're going to help fulfill a shortage of software developers are two different things.
If people were held back by not being able to build production ready web apps, we'd have much fewer apps. We'd probably had much fewer SQL-injection and other silly vulnerabilities as well -- but on average broken tools are better than no tools. Broken tools can be improved.
For what it's worth, I still think BrandonM's comments are spot on. But I think it was also obvious that easily "dropping" files "in the cloud" was a great service to those that weren't inclined/could set it up for themselves.
You don't have to build something production ready. Part of learning about programming is learning how it helps you with smaller things.
You don't have to write a web server in Perl, you can write a script that saves people from editing some horrible text file in Word to remove extra lines.
Similarly, some apps are complex 3D games, and others are timers that let you know when your egg is cooked, or your break is over.
Encouraging people to play with code and telling them they're going to help fulfill a shortage of software developers are two different things.