I can see them pulling something off. It probably won't be earth shattering from a technical perspective, it will have some compromises that the crypto space will dislike, their storage service will suck, and "TON Services" will be a slightly nicer interface for an Etherium clone. But that doesn't matter, as long as the payment part works and scales, the interface is good and the marketing is right.
Large adoption can smooth over a lot of flaws, and Telegram has the right tools and vision for achieving that.
Great comment, that is exactly what I think is going to happen.
The big risks I see with the Telegram ICO have nothing to do with the tech. They are as follows:
A) They build out all this functionality to support crypto currency, etc and it sees low adoption/usage with their users.
This happened with Snapchat and messenger when they introduced the ability to send money. People still used Venmo, including many of my friends who work at Facebook.
B) They roll out this tech, it starts taking off, Facebook detects it and they smoother it by cloning the functionality and rolling it out in messenger/WhatsApp. Aka what happened to Snapchat with stories.
Large adoption can smooth over a lot of flaws, and Telegram has the right tools and vision for achieving that.