This reminds me of the Netbook arms race except the end product is infinitely more useful.

Netbooks have tremendous utility to a subset of users. I have an old netbook with one of the slowest CPUs released in the past decade (Atom Z520), but it gets great battery life, and runs Emacs, Python, and a number of other tools I need like a champ.

Is that what most people want? No. But most people aren't microcontroller hardware hackers either.