For the consumer space, people would be better served with something like the Samsung 951 or 960 EVO or 960 PRO. These devices have a read latency of around 60-70uS and very high sequential bandwidths at QD1 (in excess of 1 GByte/sec) due to the controller having a sequential optimization in its firmware. Beyond that, the Intel numbers are certainly going to be better (at 10x the price!) in the random-read case, but both Intel and the Samsung NVMe devices approach similar performance caps at higher queue depths. So for the consumer it makes *ZERO* sense to buy an expensive XPoint device.
For the enterprise space this first XPoint device has two really serious problems. The first is that chip density isn't nearly high enough. The second is that durability is also not nearly high enough. Intel was originally promising durabilities in excess of 1 million write cycles per cell. They are releasing a device with durabilities in the 30,000 writes per cell range. That just isn't good enough to use as a ram caching layer. Until durabilities improve, I think there will be only modest demand for this particular device in the commercial space. The use case is very specialized. Even most cloud services won't have any use for XPoint.
The lower latency is just not that big an issue in the NVMe form factor... 10uS is still a long time vs dram. For the sub-1uS latency they expect to have in a DDR form factor they need the higher durabilities for it make sense, and the DDR form factor still has serious issues with cpu stalls that a more conventional paging scheme does not have. So in an enterprise environment with a DDR form factor, we not only need far higher durabilities, we also need far more memory channels and far more cpu threads (maybe go to 4-way hyperthreading) to maintain cpu performance.
So Intel might have something here, but the technology needs significant improvement over what they are releasing with this device and their cpus are not well-matched to the increased stalls.
-Matt