I understand the advantage of voice control, but operating one physical object vs another sounds like a simple substitution.
In the morning my flat turns on the light in the sleeping room automatically to wake me up, but everything else is still switched off, untill I really wake up. Then I want to say to my flat that I'm awake and it should start brewing the coffe and tell me that I need to leave soon because the train is leaving, it also should start the radio so I can listen to the news while brushing my teeth.
For that a button in the sleeping room would be awesome, I even build one myself for about $2 https://github.com/jeena/esp8266-button
My flat shuts everything down which might use energy when I leave and it can't see my phone on bluetooth anymore. Then it also starts the CCTV cam so it can notify me if someone came into my flat while I'm away. When I come back it cuts the power to that CCTV.
/s
Snark aside, the illision of leisure/luxury/laziness is often valued as the real thing, effective or not. Could an app for your already omnipresent phone do this? Sure, but this is a sleek tactile button, no apps to futz with. I wouldn't buy one, but I get the appeal.
The next evolution will be "you know the integrated home is great, but everyone's wifi still goes out every once in a while. wouldn't it be great if we could make that more robust with CAT5? What if we could do ethernet over your existing electical wiring? Then we could do Lights over Voice over IP over ethernet over AC. The best part is, we soft launched at hardware stores about 100 years ago". Welcome to the future!!!!!!
Typically when I get home I press a single button and I get a single color for my apartment. If I'm not feeling that color, I press the button again and switch to another color. The other buttons let me adjust brightness and hue. The remote then also lets me control music and smart power plugs. It's really amazing to have everything wired up and controllable with only four buttons.
The internet has already reverse engineered Alexa to make it a weapon, and unsavvy people like shiny things. So how long until an unsavvy wealthy person hires an embedded developer to integrate his entire house to work under the emulated hue model? Because the day its up and running, that unsavvy rich guy is going to throw a party. And that embedded developer might just show up and say "Hey alexa, set a timer for everyone's sleep monitors within your geofence. when they're all asleep, disarm the security system for 1 hour, turn up everyones binaural sleep aids for one hour, and hire me three ubers so I can make a clean getaway with the goldbars in the basement. Oh yeah, Alexa, unlock the vault.
That's not even remotely true without a significant amount of physical hacking and a substantial amount of software programming. Most appliances are not smart devices and do not provide simple control interfaces, let alone APIs that can integrate with Alexa, et al.