Not sure nest would win if it was easier to disable. Have you ever had a smoke alarm that goes off every couple hours? You can't sleep. Doesn't matter if you can turn it off with a wave.
And let's say you reach the point where you instinctively wave so it doesn't bother your sleep, now what happens when there's a fire?
False alarms are the problem. From the video and reports, it appears the Nest Protect has real problems with this.
With the nest, the alarm turned by itself for no reason, you don't cook in bedroom, he even said that he got notification when he was at work.
Two different reasons, your situation was that smoke alarm was too sensitive, perhaps you placed it close to the oven, here the alarm fires for no reason, and it is not the kitchen one, but bedroom one where normally you don't have smoke.
That is, in fact, a false alarm.
The behavior described by cowsandmilk is highly predictable: provide false alarms, and people will almost always disable or bypass the alarm.
Be aware that battery powered smoke detectors are a retrofit, and do not meet building code requirements. They are better than nothing, but failure due to disconnected or missing batteries is already in the realm of worse than the worst thing that can legally be built today.
They're two separate concepts. We should make it really easy to temporarily silence a smoke alarm (for, say, 15m or 4h), so that people almost never have to fall back on incapacitation.
And mandating wired ones does not address the problem. People still incapacitate them, by unplugging them. More generally, people will always find a way to silence a smoke alarm, and the regulators' goal should be to ensure that they do it in a temporary way.
Citation: http://www.nfpa.org/research/reports-and-statistics/fire-saf... which says that 60% of people who died in a housefire were in a building that had no operating smoke alarms. A few more quotes:
"Surprisingly, the death rate was much higher in fires in which a smoke alarm was present but did not operate than it was in home fires with no smoke alarms at all."
"Smoke alarm failures usually result from missing, disconnected, or dead batteries. People are most likely to remove or disconnect batteries because of nuisance activations."