Don't know about the OP, but we were bitten by this - badly - after our logic to throttle Glacier retrieval failed.
AWS has now added the ability to set a spending limit to avoid runaway retrievals. Nonetheless, from my point of view the ultra-complicated pricing scheme is nothing short of a disaster for Glacier as a product. I think it will continue to seriously impact its uptake, and Google is smart to exploit the opportunity to offer a simple, straightforward pricing scheme.
The use case is people who have a requirement to store data and probably never need to access it, either for reg requirements, or legal requirements, etc. In which case paying a couple of hundred bucks for retrieval is fine, especially if they can access at a high level of granularity
edit: Also as others have pointed out, Nearline is limited in retrieval time as well, so the cost difference isn't nearly as large.
