Curtis' abilities surrounding marketing, PR and his brand has and will continue to drive this product. Not the technology.
Copycats can build the technology, but that's it. All the aspects of the product that have resulted it reaching the top of HackerNews are unfortunately a lot harder to reproduce.
One problem is that your average designer will not know what versioning is, never mind have an opinion as to whether it'd be useful or not.
I see this as a case of applying a successful model from one field to another without consideration around whether this is actually a problem in the first place.
Andy Warhol produced numerous versions of his Campbell soup, in doing so he added some value in asking questions, if it was just one can of soup this wouldn't have been the case.
A can of soup doesn't equal a painting of a can of soup.