The IoT is much more than just the embedded hardware. It's the potential that lies within connecting embedded hardware. Extracting and refining data from embedded machines/sensors/nodes. The whole ecosystem of apps/services that can potentially be created on top of these new data streams.
While the embedded/microcontroller tech hasn't changed drastically, the cloud/edge processing & analytics parts of the tech stack are new. The "services" business models are also new.
And these are the kind of devices Intel has decided to overlook 15, 20 years ago and now ARM is eating its cake.
What makes it an even bigger ARM turf than otherwise.
I haven't seen any of that yet, just hype. Of course every company wants to collect more data on consumers and is hoping IoT will enable them. None has provided a compelling reason for a "consumer" to buy an IoT device. Look at how Nest was all hype and then had a thermostat fail at its primary function when it lost the net connection. That's a huge step backward, and it's not going to get any better when the data collection remains the priority.
(Disclaimer: I work on the MessageSight messaging engine used in Watson IoT)