I'm starting to think that IoT is going to be heavily WiFi and that, with some exceptions, when you bring a device home, you'll connect to it using your phone, tablet, or PC using Direct Wi-Fi so as to configure it to access your Wi-Fi internet router, and from that point on it will be talking directly to the cloud through your Wi-Fi router. In addition to accessing it through the cloud, you and/or other modules can also still access it with Direct WiFi and/or through your WiFi router. Consider that an ESP8266 module can already do all that and costs around $2 in quantity one with free delivery. It won't be for everything or for everyone, but 80-20 rule suggests it will be a de facto standard. After all, just about everybody has a wi-fi router that's already setup, internet connected, reliably working, and has good coverage.
I've started playing with these modules just recently. The original models had just 512K of flash memory. The newest one, the ESP-13, packs 8x that amount (4 megabytes), but still costs just $2-3 dollars and has more GPIO pins exposed for use. I think a lot of new stuff is going to manifest by means of the extra flash space for programs. If you want, you can program it using the Arduino IDE or a more professional IDE if you prefer.. It has more compute power than any of the arduino's, and it has more RAM than any of the arduinos except for the Due. It doesn't have as many GPIO pins as some of the Arduino's, but it has enough for most things, and more can be added with I2C boards, etc. Whether you like it or not, it's an existence proof and can do real work today.
I bring it up because the hub wars may no longer be terribly relevant, and that's probably a good thing for overall market growth. Rather than remain stuck, I think the market is starting to bypass that adoption obstacle, and that's because, unlike before, it's now incredibly cheap to do so.
