A few things to consider:
1) Related wholly owns Equinox, and through Equinox, Soul Cycle. My guess is that if Equinox were coming to Midtown, it would have been in Related's building, instead of the Whole Foods, but I could be mistaken. Equinox also acquired Sport Club LA last year, which is even more upscale.
Gym memberships at Equinox start at $150-200 in most cities, at least that I'm aware of. Are there any successful gyms in Atlanta that might approach that? It would be a big leap if the most expensive gym that wasn't part of a private club was only like $50/mo.
Also just because the comment was made...Equinox doesn't necessarily target the gay population. It's exclusive, and gays love to be exclusive so sometimes they are naturally drawn. But for instance, in SF, the gays definitely have their own gyms, and there is no Equinox in Castro (though a Soul Cycle just opened). SF has a ton of gyms that are in the $80-$130 range, sort of above the 24 Hr Fitness level, and it has gyms that are even far more expensive than Equinox. There are only 3 Equinoxes (one was a Sports Club LA which is even more expensive) and they target the financial district workers/preppy crowd (old stock exchange building in the FiDi, Market St in the Four Seasons, and the Cow Hollow/Pac Heights area, which couldn't be demographically more different from the Castro/Mission area).
2) I'm really excited (most excited) about NCR. I'm still not holding my breath on 98 14th St...I'm thinking that will be first to start in the next cycle.
RE: NCR, though, 485K sf is large, but not that large. If this is to be a corporate HQ building, particularly one that is single tenant and not multi-tenant (NCR being a research heavy firm, I believe, likely makes the prospect of a multi-tenant building more difficult), then the floorplates will be quite large. The site itself is quite large. No reason to build tall and slender.
For instance, tech firms really want those 30K+++ sf floorplates. Hence Ponce City Market. Difficult to find sites in a CBD that can support 30K+ floorplates easily, though probably still relatively easy in Atlanta. I would think even the NCR site can. Law firms and financial services firms have smaller offices and value window offices more, thus 15-25K sf floorplates are fine for them.
Let's just posit 30K sf floorplates for NCR. That's not extreme at all. In fact, really tall slender buildings have even larger floorplates. Salesforce Tower in SF will have 25K sf floorplates and it will appear slender at only 1,070 ft.
Maybe it's 30K sf or let's call it 25K sf in lower floors and 15K sf in upper. That makes it almost identical to LinkedIn's building that is just wrapping up here in SF. 370 ft and 26 stories with 452K rentable square feet.
http://www.tishmanspeyer.com/properties/222-second-street#
Just food for thought. I wouldn't personally hold my breath for much more than 30 stories or ~400-450 ft. I don't think it will happen with NCR, but I think they can hire a good architectural firm and still make a statement at 300-400 ft right beside the highway, which makes even a shorter building way more visible.
3) RE: running out of developable sites and needing to clear some single family housing out.
I'm sure the discussion in Seattle concerning this very thing sprang to mind for some of you. I don't think Atlanta is even close to there yet. I was just in Atlanta this summer admiring all the construction. But it still hit me hard how sparsely built up the city still is. There are TONS of lots laying around. Land prices are still dirt cheap. They really are...$10M/acre is nothing. Especially with Atlanta's propensity to allow for and build tall. Miami's CBD has now exceeded $100M/acre. SF's has exceed $200M/acre. We won't even broach what an acre would cost in Manhattan if an acre existed. Related's land basis in Miami alone for some projects probably approaches the hard costs they are projecting for their tower in Atlanta. That's a huge thing.
So Seattle is thinking about eliminating more SFR and up-zoning some existing SFR districts. Consider that its greater downtown area (think DT Atl + Midtown) has about 60 million sf of office (nearly 2x greater Atlanta CBD), 15K hotel rooms (equivalent to greater Atlanta CBD), and probably 10x as many residential towers/5x as many residents, and an overall city density of around 8K ppsm approaching 3x the density of Atlanta city proper, it's in a different ballpark of needing to figure out a way to continue to grow up as it truly runs out of space/lots. I'd say fortunately for development/developers, Atlanta is not even close to there yet.
4) Where are the construction update pics?
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I wanted to respond to that comment but didn't feel like looking up all the facts, so thank you. I thought the whole thing sounded a bit exaggerated...Seattle is obviously more densely built than Atlanta and has less vacant lots for development, but we need to stay within the confines of reality. 
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