When I first heard of the Intel Compute Card, I was a little bit frustrated at how much media attention they were getting and how similar their marketing terms were (more on that later). What I realized was that neither of these thing will hurt the project in the long run, for a number of reasons.
First off, I don't think Intel's product will actually succeed. Why? Corporations make money by selling the next product at the end of the life of the product. In this case, though, unless Intel is getting into the refrigerator business and every other business they plan to release every upgradeable product into, *every* company in the deal must be making money by selling the next product. Intel won't have a problem with this, as people will happily buy the "brains" upgrade, but the partner companies will not be able to sell upgrades without making significant improvements to their products (other than RAM, processor, etc.) which will make the products more expensive or increase their life cycle (both things making the partner company uncompetitive). So, if any company makes any kind of products, it will be a single more expensive one, with poor quality parts so that it will fail sooner rather than later.
The similar marketing terms used may hurt this project in the very short term, because people who have heard of Intel's (failed) product will associate this project's terminology with a failed corporation's product. But in the long run, it won't even matter.
Based on that assumption that they fail (or it turns out to be vaporware), it will not actually hurt the project's long term success, since the goal of this project is to reach mass volume (100 million+ units). CES does not reach most non-technical people, who are the ultimate target audience of this project. Even many technical people do not hear about every product that is announced at CES, so the project will not suffer from the similar marketing.
These are just my initial thoughts, and I, for one, will not worry too much about this product.
tldr; All the companies involved need to sell new products, this business model will only work for Intel (not their partners). CES does not reach this project's target audience (in mass volume), so it failing will not hurt this project's longest term goals.