I friend of mine in the infosec business spends most of their time (it seems to me) to make their malware honeypots super representative of their respective hardware. Whether its a windows XP based thermostat, a Siemen's PLC controller, or a banker's desktop PC, its kind of amazing the things they do.
My home builder tried to get us to use crestron and we noped out of that. Their stuff feels like it's a relic of the X10 days and has bonkers price tags. A single lightswitch that can dim is $200-$300 from them. And that doesn't include the hub to control things that costs (IIRC) $2-$3k.
In comparison, a lutron switch is $70 and the hub is $50.
I wouldn't consider a Lutron light switch to be a direct comparison to Crestron. Crestron targets the ultra wealthy by being very reliable (assuming setup by a competent programmer) with unified control of pretty much everything household - shades, lights, audio, video, etc. They're aiming for the kind of people who will pay a premium to make sure their house just works, every time, without having to deal with tech issues.
You could certainly bodge together a similar system for less money, but the controls won't be as nice and it'll be nowhere near as hassle free long term. HomeAssistant and competitors have really been catching up in the past few years though, i'm excited to see competition in the market. I wish they could all play nice together with reasonable APIs :/
Lest this mislead anyone, that's a touch panel not a thermostat. Pretty much all of Crestrons panels and Processors (the brains of the system) ran some form of windows embedded. They've switched the current generation over to linux I believe.
