Yeah, I think, in order to give a true vendor-neutral learning experience, you have to look for what the various platforms have in common, not what makes them different. You can't really teach or learn cloud well without getting into vendor platforms, but you don't want to get too focused on any specific platform and the particulars of how that platform's services work. "Vendor neutral" doesn't mean "anti-vendor," it means look for concepts and principles that are common across multiple vendors.
Very true. And I did enjoy doing the labs; they gave me a bit of practice with AWS, which I don't use at all, normally. What's interesting about that dynamic is that none of these platforms, in my opinion, stand out as the one I would prefer to use. Right now, my deference is to Azure and GCP, since I've used both of them. But I found myself a lot saying, "ooo...this sucks, Azure does it so much better, or, why, Microsoft, can't this be as obvious as it is in AWS?" So those kinds of compare/contrast exercises are good for knowledge.
But what candidates, particularly for the Cloud+ should also understand is that, while Cloud+ will talk about the generalities of that technology, it doesn't completely prepare someone to work in a cloud environment. A junior IT specialist who is looking to be a cloud admin should also consider taking an appropriate vendor exam for the platform he/she intends to use, such as AZ-900 from MSFT for the basics on Azure.
A great lab that I would suggest that would be good for A+ and Cloud+ candidates to cooperate on would be to construct a
Harvester HCI platform. A+/Server+/L+ candidates can assemble the underlying hardware infrastructure and load Harvester on the nodes. Cloud+ can work on provisioning resources and maybe even see if they can connect it to the cloud in the form of a hybrid environment. Security/Pen/CySA candidates can fiddle with it from a security perspective, attack/defend, maybe some capture the flag...? Lots of win here - and not many folks have actually built an On-Prem private cloud.
I'm totally gonna build one of these my own self - when I get a moment...lol
/r