Clearly I understand that SAP cannot be staffed with developers to handle new requirements for everywhere in the world
I don't, because every country has customers that pay high maintenance fees. They expect these fees to go into improvements, and a particularly critical one is legal compliance. Cheap software houses rolls these out more easily.
I've had the misfortuned of applying notes to some of these programs, particularly ECB reporting, and some customers get so fed up they hire consultants to develop custom solutions since they themselves have limited internal resources (like SAP says they have). Even if they choose SAP's solution there are so many notes to implement they have to hire consultants anyway.
I would say this is one of the things that makes customer reconsider their usage of SAP, because the cost of these consultants is very high, and this is on top of licensing fees that most customers find unreasonable to begin with. SAP needs to do better support, I would say it's more important then "going Cloud".