The competitive advantage seems to be in the Voice Search and in the gaming. If the gaming takes off, it'll be hard for anyone to compete. Everyone so far is talking about the Roku and Apple TV as competition, which they are, but what about the Xbox and PS4? Those offer gaming and other streaming services like Netflix too. And it seems as though Amazon is trying to be at the center of all of them.
The problem is that gaming is hard. Look at the ouya disaster. If you want to build a successful gaming product, you need a big developer relations team and a bunch of good first party titles to kick things off. If amazon was really trying to build a gaming console here, they needed to announce with some compelling games. as it is, nobody is going to spend the extra 40 for the controller without any games and nobody is going to write games for a platform with no users.
Ouya only supported selected games because games designed for a touchscreen interface are hard to play on a TV and with a gamepad. Amazon can support all games if they want to, but they're going to run into the same problem where most of them suck.
I said in another comment , but you're thinking candy crush I'm thinking emulators and titles like GTA, Modern Combat, Minecraft, and many other rpg and fps titles.
Most of the games on the play store have controller support. With a ps or xbox controller and apps for mapping if necessary.
