The complexity of scaling out an application to be closer to the users has never been about getting the hardware closer. It's always about how do you get the data there and dealing with the CAP theorem, which requires hard tradeoffs to be decided on when designing the application and can't be just tacked on - there is no magic button to do this, in the AWS console or otherwise.

Getting the hardware closer to the users has always been trivial - call up any of the many hosting providers out there and get a dedicated server, or a colo and ship them some hardware (directly from the vendor if needed).