As someone who kickstarted the pebble and has used it daily since then I can say that smart watches have a very narrow area of usefulness at this point. The text notifications are great, the changeable watch faces are cool, they have all the functionality of the fanciest watch, and there are some genuinely useful apps like pedometers, turn by turn directions, and time management programs. But at this point no smart watch is as good as they are being marketed. Even the most modest ads make them out to be way more than they are. My pebble really spends most its time just being a watch, and at its price point I'm OK with that. But when we get into apple watch prices that's when I just can't justify the expense for the limited utility. Wearable tech isn't a fad, it's the future. But we aren't in the future yet, there is a lot to be done before these things are as good as we want them to be.
I don't know. The ads show things you can do not necessarily things you will do. From there on you have to see what your personal use case is. For me a vibrating watch with multitimers that shows notifications was more then enough to justify a $70 open box price for a Pebble. Particularly considering that a decent vibrating watch starts at $35. The Apple watch looks a lot like a fullsized iPad to me: not a good value proposition. Except I don't forsee anyone sticking it in a keyboard case so it will have to compete with it's cheaper competition on it's own merrits.