I have nothing but respect for the NXT founders for creating such a great platform and vibrant community like NXT is. I like and respect James, jl777. Despite he is a prolific vaporware asset wizard, he is an extremely talented man in software development and more importantly in selling his ideas. No doubt Come-from-Beyond will be very successful with the IOTA project having the support of many talented people. You can see those many legendary and hero members in the IOTA thread. Even TPTB_need_war is there already. Those influential crypto users will make IOTA a very successful project - within this Bitcointalk environment. The founders will probably raise 1 million dollars by selling IOTA and then the NXT community will start selling to each other the IOTA digital currency. What will happen beyond that is predictable by the current state of NXT and other alt digital currencies.
Terms of the technology. Anybody who ever worked with IoT understand what are the real world use cases and user requirements, and can make the conclusion whether IOTA addresses them or not. It's cool having a protocol that could manage 50 billion devices, but IMHO that's simply not what real world IoT companies are expecting from an application frameworks. Of course I can't speak for the GadgetCoin developers, but based on the GDC whitepaper and info posted in this thread I believe GadgetCoin is on the right track in providing a real world application platform for real world businesses. There will be many cool projects like IOTA, TileCoin, etc., but IMHO there is enough space for multiple blockchain based IOT platforms, so personally - while I am respect them and I am sure they will make some money - I am not panicking from IOTA nor from TileCoin.