My point is though that these are complementary. Read sensor -> send data is a trivial task that takes a few lines of code, most of which is importing libraries

My point is though that these are complementary. Read sensor -> send data is a trivial task that takes a few lines of code, most of which is importing libraries and the CHIP is vastly overpowered. I'm saying, put your complex data logging/smart home/whatever logic in <language of choice> on the CHIP and have your sensors be simple (read: reliable) nodes that connect to the CHIP as a hub. It's not so much a matter of price as it is minimizing complexity. Also I don't know many people who use the native C SDK for the ESP8266. Most people use Arduino (simplified C++), but there's also Lua, Javascript and Python.