But not the impact that was forecast and it is hard to survive the perception of having over-promised and then under-delivered. It's a cruel business and no one seems to learn that brilliance in sevens is not an accurate indicator of ability in 15s.
In 2008, Victor Vito pretty much did what Ioane did and won New Zealand the Wellington Sevens. Much like Ioane, he was an intoxicating mix of speed, raw power, agility and innate ball skills.
At 1.94m and 110kg, comparisons between Vito and Lomu were inevitable. But seven years on, Vito still hasn't really found his feet at the highest level.
The athleticism has never been in doubt ... it's his capacity to run over the top of people that hasn't come through yet and maybe never will.
It took Liam Messam an inordinately long time to shake his sevens heritage. He'd been sensationally good in the abbreviated game but, a little like Vito, the graft and grunt work was a weakness until 2012.
The shame for Vito and Messam is that they have been battling expectation all their careers. Both have become All Blacks and Messam a particularly good one and, yet, certainly in the case of Vito, it feels like he has somehow come up short.
It's not just sevens stars who have been hyped too far too soon. Chiefs centre Charlie Ngatai was barely 18 when he had sent Wellington abuzz. It took him nearly five years of hard graft and a shift to Hamilton before he began to play consistently well.
Daniel Kirkpatrick, the 2008 IRB Under-19 Player of the Year, was another who didn't push on. He bounced between the Hurricanes and Blues and is now in France where, having made something of a new start, is quietly impressing.
And who could forget Isaia Toeava, who wasn't hyped by external forces, but was elevated to the test arena way too soon by the All Blacks selectors. They picked him at 19 when he had barely even played ITM Cup and, if ever there was an example of how too much too soon can be a bad thing, he was it.
New Zealand's track record of nurturing juvenile stars into adult stars is not great and it's going to become a more prevalent challenge as Super Rugby teams are now aggressively chasing first XV talent.
Ioane is already contracted to play for the Blues next season and the hard part for those in charge of his future will be making sure he's not over-played in the next nine months or tricked into believing he's better than he really is.
NZRU high performance player development manager Mike Anthony says a plan has long been mapped out for Ioane and that it will continue to be reviewed.
Having seen the mistakes made in the past, centralised, coordinated planning has been adopted with a view to ensuring young players are not pulled and pushed by too many paymasters.
Still only 17, Ioane will attend a New Zealand under-20 training camp after he returns from the Las Vegas Sevens this week and is targeting a place in the final squad that travels to Italy in June for the Junior World Championships.
"We take a long-term view about development," says Anthony. "An application has to be submitted with a development plan [when a player still in his teens is being courted by a professional team].
"We [NZRU] act as a check-point to see how they are going and ensure everyone is working towards the wider picture.
"We ask how much exposure are they [young players] going to have - game time - because we know that there is a big increase in the physicality at the higher levels, especially Super Rugby.
"We also make sure they have just one conditioning programme regardless of whether they are playing sevens and/or 15s. That makes it easier for the boys, especially someone like Rieko."
