Right, but that's kind of the problem. If I were signing up for the first time and needed a simple db, I might see the SimpleDB service in the dashboard and try it out, not knowing its been unofficially deprecated.

Similar from what I can tell with CloudSearch being superceded by Elasticsearch Service. Although their version of elasticsearch is ~2 years old and hasn't been updated since they launched the service, so this may be a case where neither are getting any attention.

The worst part is, AWS support is so tight-lipped in the forums and over web support that there's no way to tell what is still fully supported and what's being silently put out to pasture. You have to look for hints based on what products they're doing webinars about, looking at the momentum of what products they're making tweaks to in the weekly update emails, etc.