I've just messed with the pulumi-docker library, my initial hope was to create a cloud vm with docker installed /w Pulumi and then also with pulumi specify the container and command to run in docker on that vm. So far I've got the impression that's not possible, am I right? Going to bed right now, won't answer 'till tomorrow, thanks in advance for reading.

It's possible, but not solely with pulumi-docker and depends on your actual cloud provider. The most generic way to do it would be to create a VM and provide a startup/userdata script to it that installs and runs docker. Some of the providers have more purpose-built solutions. Here's how you can do it with Google Cloud - https://github.com/pulumi/examples/blob/master/gcp-py-instance-nginx/__main__.py#L55-L102. Azure has Container Instances for example.