Plenty of hosting companies offer managed hosting as an upsell. You can't even get pricing for it at Softlayer without talking to a sales rep, for example.

Rackspace is the only large hosting provider who provides that across the board, because even their smallest cloud servers come with phone support. As far as I know, you cannot get phone support with an arbitrary set of cloud servers at Softlayer, or Amazon, or Google.

Would you rather be forced to fly first-class or have the option to choose?

No one is forcing anyone to buy from Rackspace. The question is whether Rackspace has a unique value proposition against Google or Amazon, and the answer is support.