Prayer before an icon is restful, quiet, and the image helps us keep our attention on God as we pray. An "icon corner" is something like a little "church," a place set aside in the home for prayer and peace.
That is what Newman is arguing also. The confusion, I think, is a rhetorical ploy to argue against veneration of saints in general by claiming that it is idolatrous.
But I agree both with blessed John Newman and David Clayton that there is a difference between the attitude and perception -- not a theological difference, but difference of disposition that exists between the North-West and South-East. I don't know if it is conditioned by the memory of iconoclasm, so vivid still in the North-West, where it remains a matter of theological dispute among Christians, but long forgotten in Mediterranean south; or perhaps by the temperamental differences.
I am inclined to thing it is a defensive reaction against theological criticism, especially among the Catholic British who had to hide their devotions till relatively recently in historical perspective. That is because the Russians, -- the race I know more than a casual thing about -- are Nordic by temperament but treat their icons like family members. Of course, in Russia iconoclasm, while very recent, was mere atheist brutality without any earnest theological concern we are familiar with in the West, -- so the Russians had to hide their icons rather than modify behavior once in the presence of icons.
If my hypothesis is correct, then so much more important is the task of evangelizing the West through Catholic, and especially through Byzantine art. If we do that, our faith in the West will regain the innocence of a child, with which an Easter Christian kisses his icon.