Not a very good article and the author has completely misunderstood a lot of things when it comes to ZigBee, nor does the article explain anything about the announcement from the ZigBee Alliance.
Yes, the various ZigBee profiles are a pain, especially for someone like us, but there's a little bit of logic to the madness.
Most remote controls using ZigBee to date are RF4CE, i.e. non infrared wireless remote controls using the 2.4GHz band. They have a minimal ZigBee stack and everything is designed to be low cost, since after all, remote controls are expected to be cheap. Looking at this announcement, Remote Control 2.0 seems to expand RF4CE to also support basic ZigBee HA (Home Automation) support, although it's not clear how this will work in practical terms. ZigBee HA already supports remote controls, but this seems to be a move towards merging the RF4CE and HA profiles.
Most ZigBee LL (Light Link) products have a fallback mode so they can be connected to a ZigBee HA gateway. For example, this is how the Osram Sylvania and GE bulbs can work with the Almond+. However, Philips didn't add this to the Hue which is why the hub is still needed alongside the Almond+.
Many of the other profiles were designed for commercial applications and doesn't really affect consumers with the only potential exception being the Smart Energy profile if you have a smart power meter t hat support it.
Still, it's a bit of a mess, but it's not quite as bad as it looks.
What the author of the Gigaom piece mentioned about preventing customer lock-in is true, but it's not a different ZigBee profile at all, instead some of these companies add an additional software layer to their products, suck as Lowe's Iris which is made by Alarm.com. These sensors are expecting a certain response from the gateway and if they don't get it, they won't connect. As far as I'm aware, Control4 is doing something similar as well and even SmartThings is doing some customization on at least some of its ZigBee sensors.
On the flip side of things Z-Wave really isn't as good as the Z-Wave Alliance is making it out to be, as although there's only one (well, actually, two standards now with Z-Wave Plus) standard, there's something like 7 or 8 different frequencies depending on what part of the world you live in, all based on local regulations. This is important to remember if you're moving country, as technically it's illegal to use unapproved radio frequencies and on top of that, locally purchased Z-Wave device won't work with a gateway/controller from a country that uses a different frequency as this is hard coded into the Z-Wave chips. This is not an issue with ZigBee as it's using the globally recognized 2.4GHz range, although it's more congested so it's not ideal when it comes to interference.
Z-Wave is also quite loosely controlled when it comes to what's being tested during certification as only about 40% of the "standard" is being tested. As such, basic things like binary switches are easy to support and even most binary sensors, like door/window sensors or a PIR sensors. However, the tricky part is that there's a "manufacturer specific register" in almost all Z-Wave devices which can contain pretty much anything. It's also difficult to support multi-functional sensors, as each additional feature added needs to be added by the gateway/controller manufacturer, since only the primary sensor function is automatically presented when such a sensor is added to a gateway/controller.
Z-Wave Plus will hopefully alleviate some of this, as the certification process is a bit stricter and will test 80% of the standard and there will be less room for manufacturer specific items. We'll have to see how that progresses though, as it's all still pretty new and requires a new chipset.
I'm not making out either standard as being better or worse here, I'm simply trying to explain the complexities that both standards suffer from and that we and everyone else have to deal with. Hopefully this helps clarify some of the confusion between the various standards and why interoperability is the way it is today.
