Yes, Heroku was the first. I tried it out. It was fun, but I think they realised that though it was a novel idea, it was not the _Big Idea_, and they replaced it with what they now have. That's pretty inspiring when you consider how much work they threw away and how that decision has been rewarded.
I think it was less about speed and more about trying to replace peoples' editor / workflow. People are very particular about the tools they use and putting the editor and deployment in the browser doesn't do much in terms of productivity (and probably more counterproductive than anything else)
I would say what they threw away was essentially a gimmick. Assuming the functionality of Heroku was the same before and after, publishing from github rather than publishing based on editing files online doesn't change their offering.
