With 2012R2, MS is coming very close. And while you do need SCCM to manage a larger Hyper-V deployment, it can still come out cheaper than ESXi. I just did the math. I have 30 sockets of vSphere Enterprise. I license WIndows Datacenter anyway, so that is not a cost. If I was do do it over, it would cost me half in SCCM licenses for the same infrastructure as it does on vSphere licenses.
As far as moving to the cloud, Reliable, fast connectivity and storage ramp up pretty quickly.