You don't need to run the gcloud command to connect to a Cloud SQL instance. You can run the cloud_sql_proxy as a background process on your machine and then you can use mysql or psql to connect to it instantly.
I guess your answer supports the parent's case: the happy path is a charm, but you need to learn a whole lot more to use it effectively. Paraphrasing the tag-line of Mesosphere, it's a new OS, one that is targeted at data centres, not small pet-servers setups.
