The NIC is attached to the host bus through the north bridge. But other hosts on the same ethernetwork are not considered to be "local". We dont need to get crazy about teh semantics to know that when a cloud provider says an SSD is locally attached, that it's closer than an ethernetwork away.

If that’s the game we’re going to play then technically my driveway is on the same road as the White House.

exactly. it's not about what's good for the consumer, it's about what they can do without losing a lawsuit for false advertising.