With EC2 you can (to some extent) scale both horizontally (adding more instances) and vertically (going to a larger instance) - however, the latter cannot be done automatically.
Almost nothing is inherently shared between instances - they run their own operating systems, have their own memory, and their own storage, and own IPs. Treat them as you would any VPS - just with a bit more automated provisioning system.
One place where EC2 differs from most VPS solutions is in the ability to add storage. This can be done without stopping the instance, in the form of 'adding new volumes' (so you would have, for example, /dev/xvda, and then add /dev/xvdb, etc.)
You can go to a larger instance via the following:
Stop (not terminate) the instance
Use ec2-modify-instance-attribute i-xxxxxx -t to change the instance type
Start the instance
For all other aspects of scalability, you are on your own - you have to design your application to make use of what Amazon provides:
Elastic IPs - to provide a single constant public IP despite changing the underlying instance
Elastic Load Balancers - to distribute requests between the instances
EBS volumes - for persistent storage
EC2 instances - for computing power
S3 & Cloudfront - for content delivery
RDS - for MySQL databases managed by AWS (there is no built in scalability though)
AWS definitely doesn't do everything for you - it is not an automatic solution to take any application and instantly let it scale, but it does provide a framework on which you can build an application that will easily scale.
You can provision additional servers at will - either identical to existing ones, or different from them, and AWS will increase/decrease the number of instances on a number of metrics (e.g. load) if you want.
You can build arrays of disks, setup network file systems, network your instances together (VPC), and perform pretty much any function that would be necessary to build a scalable architecture.
At least in part the underlying reason for the setup on AWS is because each 'instance' is a predefined virtual machine. To modify the specs of a virtual machine would require you to stop and start it anyway. Amazon has provided a large assortment of instance types, to choose from, but beyond that, you cannot customize the CPU/RAM of an instance-type. Additionally, horizontal scaling overcomes the limitation of a single machine (for instance, it would be unimaginable for any large site to run on one server, no matter how large) - and avoids single points of failures. Arguably, if you need more power than is offered by their largest instances, horizontal scaling would likely end up as your solution, whether or not you ran on AWS.
Best Answer
To answer your questions directly.
0) Limits protect AWS infrastructure from overuse, prevent significant loss by fraud, and prevent customers from running up large bills unintentionally. More here. For example, if your access keys are made public by mistake someone could spin up many p2.16xlarge instances to run crypto currency mining at $14/hr.
1) No. The region you select should allow at least one t2.micro, as per the free tier. Once you establish that you will actually pay your bill AWS will raise limits.
2) I wouldn't call 16 hours unusual. The first time I requested an increase it took 12 hours to reply and 4 days to do the increase. The second time it took a couple of hours to reply and around 36 hours to do the increase.
Edit August 2018
I was on an AWS training course recently. We had scripts create a number of AWS accounts. One of those accounts had a limit of zero EC2 instances in some regions, with only a single t2.micro and another t2 instance size I don't recall available. I got an email in the next 12 hours saying the limits had been increased and instances could be created. There's was a theory that the region we were using (US-East-1) had some kind of a temporary resource constraint.
So in some cases the answer is "be patient, limits will automatically increase". The default limits do increase over time, which I assume is to protect AWS against people and automated systems taking advantage of their free tier.