It doesn't hurt to get acquainted with these tools to get a feel for how they work. You also don't need to set up a massive cluster in AWS to play with them. It is in fact possible to set up local running jobs (check the tutorials for most of these projects).
Keep in mind that there's no substitute for working on, say, a 1000-node hadoop cluster and getting a feel for how such resources have to be shared across a large organization, but learning the basic paradigm of available tools is helpful.
But is it of any benefit to anyone not really thinking about working at a tech company or with disposable income, but wanting to use "big data" frameworks to make conclusions from large datasets?
