[bbgm]

lukehoban says it best in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28711903 where he talks about the three things CloudFormation provides.

The Cloud Control API is an API to the resource model. It unlocks the ability for AWS teams to contribute to the resource model without having to worry about the rest of what Cloudformation does. As a service owner interested in contributing to other systems like TF and Pulumi, now I just have to contribute to one thing. In the medium/long term it's going to be a lot more efficient way to evolve how we all use AWS resources in our favorite Infrastructure-as-code systems.

Disclosure: Work at AWS (but not on the CloudFormation team)