Good comment; but I’ve quoted the key part of your post.
SmartThings (a subsidiary of Samsung Inc.) exists to make money. It is not a charity, it is not an Open Source company. The profit margin from hardware sales (especially just the hub) is pretty small. On the other hand, the premium added to the price of an appliance (such as a Samsung Refrigerator) gained by just adding a low resolution slow tablet and WiFi (sub-$100 cost of materials) is quite high.
But neither of those compares to the profit they hope to make by selling integration (device handlers and apps), partnerships (integration with home security and home insurance companies, fitness, … who knows?), and aggregation of our data for marketing purposes (since marketing / advertising is obviously where all the money in the world is: Just look at the valuations of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Yahoo, Amazon … These companies make very little money on hardware and software sales (if any); all their income comes from selling ads (or, in the case of Amazon, commissions on selling products sold by anybody in the Amazon Marketplace, but aggressively suggested by the Amazon data algorithms).
The idea of “consumer connected things” does have inherent value. Heck, plain old home automation has value, and that’s why very expensive systems like Control4 and Crestron and others, exist. But I’m pretty sure the long term survival of SmartThings will depend on “the cloud” as that is the only way they can 100% capture all the data and integrations needed to profit from consumers’ “voluntary” loss of privacy.