I have part of my team using komodo, and so I have looked into Stackato. At first Stackato looked nice, but I can not figure out how to use it. It is available for download as a VM image. You can also deploy it to an existing infrastructure. But what is the point of this. Most cloud platforms I've used(Bluemix, PWS, Openshift, etc...) are in a cloud instance, but Stackato does not seem to do this. Do I have to use Stackato with some infrastructure, or can I get a in-cloud version?
If by "in a cloud instance" you mean offered as a hosted service (like Heroku, Engine Yard, and Google App Engine) then you could try the Stackato Sandbox which is a hosted trial environment.
That said, the real benefit of Stackato is that it's PaaS software that you can run yourself (i.e. "Private PaaS"), so to really get a feel for it from an Admin/Provider's perspective, you should deploy a small cluster in a public cloud like HP Helion Public Cloud or Amazon EC2.
Yes, you can run it on your own servers, but I think the cloud hosted option what you're looking for. You can run a cluster of around 5 Stackato nodes with a free license from ActiveState, but the cloud hosting costs still apply.