As an engineer in this industry, these companies often seem like carpetbaggers, attempting to enter niche markets they know little of, with a solution who's only merit is it's hype.
Espressif will sell you a single ESP8266 for less than $2; the ESP8089 is less than a buck, again in single quantities. TI's 1ku pricing for a CC3100 SoC is $6.70. Nordic's cheapest 2.4GHz SoC is about $3.50/1ku, and that doesn't do WiFi. The cheap Espressif chips really are a big deal IMO, in the same way that cheap ARM A-series processors from Rockchip and Allwinner have radically changed many consumer markets. You can run an HTTP server on a chip that is price-competitive with an ATTINY88.
I know they've been around in volume for years, but most of the stuff I build doesn't come close to triggering that kind of volume. Therefore, the guy who wants me to send data from his forklifts to a central server in the warehouse can get it done at a cost he can more easily stomach when the hardware cost is under $20 as opposed to being around $100.
Price matters!