I expect the CONCEPTUAL idea is that this provides a place where guests (or children) can control the home, in a way that's not feasible if that control is limited to the phone, as people are suggesting.
This is not a TOTALLY crazy idea. My house is heavily homeKit'ed and it would probably benefit guests if they could occasionally change lighting or blinds rather than just accept my automation.
BUT
I suspect this will not live up to its potential, not even close, in the same way as HomePod, but even more so.
1) Will there be a plugin scheme for 3rd party apps? Pretty much the only value I derive from my (free, when AMZ was excited by the things) 1st gen AMZ echo is that it shows me when a delivery is expected today, and when it has arrived. Will I be able to get that on my Apple Echo?
Along the same lines, will notifications of things like cameras appear on this device, so I can see eg who is at the front door, or walking down the driveway. Note this is not hooking into HomeKit Cameras, of course there'll be something for that. This is to hook into all the other infrastructure out there of Nest cameras or Ring Doorbells or whatever.
2) Will this be accompanied by a better framework for home automation?
HomeKit was garbage for a few years because of reliability. They have done well in the past two years or so to fix the reliability issues, but everything related to automation is still amateur hour. Writing Scenes is still pathetically inefficient, there is no way to perform obvious tasks everyone requires (eg equivalent of if/then/else, or automating by date, or grouping Scenes together for easy reuse, or replacing an existing item [eg lightbulb] with a new item that has the same role, etc etc etc).
All this stuff matters because the one group that actually derive value from this sort of product are builders and home remodellers. But they cannot fit this stuff into a house when Apple's entire model for HomeKit is amateur hour, with zero consideration for the needs of professional developers.
