Let's be clear, Ecobee's integration is cloud dependent for authorization. So it does not work without an active internet connection.
To be clear - their existing thermostats (ecobee3, ecobee4, ecobee3lite) also have 900 MHz radios in them (915 MHz to be precise). That's the radio used to communicate with the sensors.
Here are the FCC pages for their existing thermostats and sensors:
As you can see - they all have radios in the 908-927 MHz range.
FCC documents indicate the new thermostat is somewhat different. It will have dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth. The sensor radio is much narrower in bandwidth: 920-927 MHz, matching the new sensor
Based on this, I would think it is likely that the new sensor cannot be paired to older thermostats and vice-versa.
Fair enough l, but that’s not depending on a cloud instance for regular operations like Nest. There is a distinct difference.
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Bingo!
Look at this less abridged version of a quote already mentioned in this thread from an article on The Ambient:
“Moving forward, partners are no longer going to be able to access specific Nest data," Mike Soucie, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Google, and co-founder of Revolve (the smart home hub bought by Nest and shut down in 2015) tells The Ambient. "They're going to have to rely on the Works with Google Assistant platform to create routines with Nest products."
The reasons for this are security and simplicity, according to Soucie. WWN allowed many partners to access data about Nest products that today Google doesn’t feel they should have access to. These include Home/Away data, motion, and temperature set points from its thermostat, and the ability to turn on and off Nest Cameras based on external events.
“That’s sensitive data that we need to be sure we understand what partners are using it for,” says Soucie. “As much value as this is provided in the past it's been a bridge solution. I use the example of, you can't have multiple masters in the home, there's too many ecosystems today.”
Instead of having individual third-party devices control the same product, Google wants to be your smart home’s master. “What we were finding is that multiple ecosystems and multiple masters were trying to control the same Nest device. And there was a level of confusion,” he says. “Now, rather than having multiple platforms and ecosystems control Nest devices, we're bringing it all under the Works with Google Assistant ecosystem, a single controller for all your Nest, Google, and third-party devices.”
(Boldfaced emphasis added by me)
Yep, that's right. Voice control and routines is what we get. No cross-device automations. No access to your own detailed personal data.
These quotes from Soucie are evidence of Google's totally contradictory PR spin, including that carefully-worded response on Twitter.
Everybody simmer down. The dust hasn't settled yet. Two likely outcomes:
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The Works with Assistant integration will allow us to create routines that basically do what we could do before with IFTTT and other Works with Nest integrations (still unknown what this will look like exactly). With that, we should be able to setup routines that will allow virtual switches on HE to be controlled. So for example, your Nest Smoke/CO alarm goes off, your Google Assistant routine will turn on a virtual device on HE and RM will take over doing what we need.
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Alphabet bows to public pressure and back peddles
As for controlling Google products from HE, we are fine as long as they don't kill Google Assistant Relay. Can't speak for everyone else that doesn't have this capability. It's pretty awesome. Very worth the effort to setup the node.js server on a Raspberry Pi or an old computer.
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Not really, Ecobee could pull their homekit support or their servers could go down (which never happens) and it would fail to work or cease to work.
Of course not 
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I've done some pretty cool multi-month timelapses with the Nest API and this will almost certainly kill that off. Ex: A neighbors house being built, retaining wall being installed in my back yard. With Nest’s built in timelapse I can’t easily tell it to skip nighttime or weekends, and making timelapses that are longer than a week is effectively impossible without copy/pasting together a lot of them.
Also, with local snapshots, I don’t have to worry about putting the timelapse together before the video is erased from the cloud.
In my particular use case privacy was not a problem, as I controlled the integration from start to finish. I guess I could just sell the nest cam and pickup an el-cheapo local cam online for the same thing 
.
No, the sky is not falling...
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Thanks for sharing this. Looks like Google is backpedaling a little bit, which I believe is a good thing.
Here's The Verge's take on today's Google announcement.
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It sounds like Partners are going to have to work with google and do a security audit to have integration. Is this something Hubitat is pursuing?
One could only hope. There is no native Nest support with Hubitat now, so my guess is that this may not be a priority.
To be fair; there was nest support until nest stopped reviewing integration applications nearly a year ago. All of this delay presumably pending the Works with Nest API shutdown announcement. HE removed the nest [app] a couple of months ago when it became clear that the review wasn't going to happen any time soon.
@SteveV and @jkudave I beg to differ about no native Nest support already for HE. There was, but for people that had a developer account already. HE pulled it from the app list when Nest wouldn’t let new developer accounts get created. Personally, I had a developer account and have the native Nest integration working in HE still. So I would guess that HE will end up looking into it on the new platform
I think we're saying the same thing:
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I imagine that even if this was something Hubitat wanted to pursue it would be limited by Nest.
The reason being that Nest would prioritize other larger partners such as SimpliSafe and Amazon first.
Smaller partners are going to have a long wait in line.
Well I don't have any idea how this will all shake out. The only control I currently use with Nest is my wife tells Google it's time for bed and the living room lamp is turned off via Hubitat and the Nest thermostat is set to 60 degrees via Google Assistant. I'm guessing this will keep on working as long as Google doesn't shut out Hubitat.
That will be a piece of cake to do directly as a routine in Google Assistant anyway.
A new update:
