You can create a VPC and then add an Internet Gateway to it, making instances on particular subnet(s) of your VPC accessible from the Internet.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide...

Does this meet your needs?

That is really quite convoluted for what should be a simple process

One issue I have with VPC is that instances don't get public IPs by default like public cloud instances do. Instead you have to attach EIPs, which has extra complexity (esp. taking care to deallocate them if you don't care about persistence), and you're limited to only 5 EIPs by default. I know you can request to increase the limit, but I have no idea what the approval process is like, and it seems completely silly when you can get as many public IPs as you want by launching multiple public cloud instances.

(If you're curious, my architecture requires hosts outside of AWS to connect directly to EC2 instances. Using a NAT box inside VPC would likely introduce a bottleneck. I don't need multiple IPs per instance, but I just wanted to provide some feedback as to why VPC with an Internet Gateway feels inferior to public cloud EC2 for me. Thanks!)

We (AppHarbor) haven't had problem getting additional public IP addresses, just ask.

Getting approved for additional public IP addresses is very easy. We were approved for 10x more IP addresses within 24 hours.

Likely never. Amazon has made it pretty clear that VPC is where all the new networking features go.