its funny since I was just in hardware store a few days ago and noticing the section on 'smart lighting'. they had a starter kit of 2 bulbs and a 'link hub' (not wink hub; not sure what the exact diff is, but its a smaller scaled down unit). $25 for that kit of 3 items. and its still WAY too much money.
this is in the pre-early adopter phase. I can't see anyone seriously wiring up their house at more than $10 per bulb, no matter how 'smart' the bulbs are.
here's another agument against each device being its own ip host. suppose I put a set of bulbs into a chandelier. do you REALLY need duplicated ip-stacks in each of the bulbs hanging on the common fixture? that's dumb. really dumb.
the proxy method is far smarter, and if the bulb dies out, I don't have to throw away a lot of otherwise good working hardware. it makes me laugh to think of each bulb in a hanging fixture, all hitting my local dhcp server, asking for an ip address.
you want to INSTANCE the bulbs, to manage them, but you really do not need an ip per bulb. even simple things like a port off of the ip host (like you'd telnet to 1.1.1.1 2000 to get to port 2000 on host 1.1.1.1) would be a reasonable instancing method that does not eat up ip addr's.
and if you are not going to be open source, why buy from you? everyone else is closed-source and if I can't have OS, then at least I'd pick a vendor who has been around a while and will continue to be.
now, if you change your view and open-source it, THEN maybe this could have some interest. so that even if you, the company, goes bye-bye, the bulbs can still have use, be patchable, etc.
remember, when you buy ip-enabled things, you HAVE to ask 'who is going to maintain the code base' and 'who is going to release security updates'. we can't count on short-term companies for this (hell, we can't even count on the big ones). if you don't release code, I see no advantage of your system over anyone else's.