Thanks, I spent a minute skimming through this post and ended up coming here hoping someone wrote a tl;dr like this. Must be challenging to write effective copy for something like this (not being sarcastic)

So how is this different from the container service from google?

One interesting bit from the article: "Does this mean that I'll be able to DTrace my Linux apps in a Docker container?" (yes)

Technically you can run dtrace on various platforms, and I don't know enough to tell you specific reasons why you would rather use dtrace on smartos than linux. I got the impression a few years ago the ports weren't as good. (perhaps relating to the linux port not yet being a kernel module?)

Debugging LX branded zones on SmartOS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oIBiWdh41c

"A gritty how-to on debugging LX branded zones on SmartOS presented internally at Joyent on 1/30/15. While given to an internal audience, there is quite a bit of information here that may be interesting to the broader community"

Frankly, the technical implementation.

What does this provide over running a Docker host running on a dedicated server?

I haven't heard of this before today, but it seems as though with this you could scale out to multiple servers and it'll continue to be treated as a single docker host. It also isn't linux.