Haiku actually seems to be trying to be something very different.
The BeFS filesystem's use of metadata / extended attributes for one, very multi-threaded core libraries and GUI for others. The kernel is also different giving the OS a very different feel.
The goals for Haiku have always seemed around desktop performance unlike most *nix derivatives which either balance other workloads or focus on servers.
NodeOS could offer something different, but what they have mentioned so far doesn't seem that interesting (then again I am not a Node or javascript developer).
Linux Kernel NodeOS is a full OS built on top of the Linux kernel
As are many other operating systems...
NodeJS Runtime Node is the primary runtime — no bash here
NPM Packages NodeOS uses NPM as its primary package manager
You can change both of these on other OSes, no? Also, are these really large pain points?
Hosted on Github Open and easy to contribute to — pull request friendly
Not really a feature