calories burned > calories consumed = weight loss.
Everything else is just fluff.
lo-carb **is** a calorie reduction diet/lifestyle. If you watch your calories lo-carbing, you eat less calries, because you stay "full" longer. Eating proteins and fats satisfies your hunger a lot longer than eating carbs.
You can't change the laws of thermodynamics. Lo-carb is not a "magic bullet", it incorporates many of the things that any diet needs to have success in losing weight: calorie reduction, portion control, and avoiding certain foods. It also helps those with abused insulin response systems to take control back from the sugar spikes.
And Atkins himself pushed for daily exercise, the other part of the equation. Just eating lo-carb won't do it, you have to move your butt, too.
Actually, just eating low carb CAN do it. I'm proof. Certainly exercise is good for you (I'm an ex aerobics instructor, so I'm all about exercise). But when I went on it in about 1997, I lost about 40 lbs without doing any exercise (other than walking around that you normally do in a day--and I wasn't working, so it wasn't that much, believe me).
susie