But, all of this nifty tech does rely on tapping in to home infrastructure (switches and devices that understand the protocol), so it's a long haul.
These devices are wired in and have 50-year design lives. The life of these protocols seems to be significantly less than 50 years, which is a pretty big mismatch.
Yes, I'm still sore about the ~10 useless X-10 switches I put in in the 2000s. ;-)
But you're absolutely right. It's hard to sell incrementally useful capability when it requires spending a fair bit of time and money to upgrade components that are doing a decent job today and probably will for years to come.
Case in point. Would I buy a Nest if I needed a thermostat today? Probably. Will I buy one to replace a perfectly good programmable thermostat that's already installed and working? Probably not.
I live in a 1200 sq foot condo, 1 floor, with limited natural light. Automated lighting activation via Bluetooth LE (Tasker on my Android phone) is very handy when I come home late at night, because walking through ~15 feet in the dark to a light switch isn't fun (yes, first world problem).
More importantly, my Nest thermostat. Am I lazy for changing the house temp from my bed? Most definitely. But that's not the point. I have saved quite a bit in utilities with its auto-away functionality, as well as its airwave cooling function (detects how long it can keep cooling the home from residual coolness in the air exchanger coils after the compressor has shut down).
Energy efficiency plays (Google buys Nest for $3.2 billion) turns tech companies into utility MVNOs. And almost everyone needs some form of power or HVAC.