Obviously, as others have noted, the hype machine was strong out of Rock Creek - BUT... there are a few reasons to not equate Nicotine and Anatabine with each other.
I just had a look, and as I understand it, Nicotine is a gigantic SLEDGE-HAMMER! It activates pretty much every receptor-type, and their sub-units. And, apparently ever type has 5 sub-units of their own...! There are 16 different types of receptor-units in humans alone, and then you have FIVE sub-units of those, per receptor...!
That makes room for a lot of different types of effects, friend... We see this with various serotonin-agonists and dopamine-agonists all the time - selective D3-agonists make you hypersexual, selective D2-agonists make you psychotic, and selective D4-agonists cause painful boners. Serotonin... well, there's a really friggin' big difference in effect between an SSRI and LSD, wouldn't you say?
Anatabine, the alcaloid in Anatabloc, is more selective than Nicotine, apparently only affecting certain sub-units - all the animal tests imply that for some reason, it's not addictive, unlike nicotine. There's also the fact that Nicotine itself, possibly something to do with immune-modulation (the alpha-7-units have a great deal of effect on the immune system, more recent data have uncovered), or possibly from some other property, outside of acetylcholine agonism, causes cancer.
Yes, that's right... Nicotine in itself, is a carcinogen.
Now... with that said... because there's so little data on Anatabine, we don't REALLY know if it's carcinogenic or not - it actually took quite some time until we found out Nicotine in itself is a carcinogen - it was always assumed that it was the additives and the burning of tobacco which caused cancer, prior to that finding, but since there's no proof of Anatabine having this danger as well, some people probably feel safer using it instead of Nicotine.
Anyways... those are the reasons why some would be more inclined to praise Anatabine, while shying away from Nicotine.
In closing: don't forget... 16 x 5 receptors... well, at least 11 x 5 receptors (the CNS ones) - that makes for a fairly varied spectrum of effects.