> 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.
Both the BeagleBone and the Minnowboard are made by the same company, CircuitCo. I'd say that the Arduino announcements today must have been a bit painful for them, except I'd guess they're probably also the partner company behind the TRE.
Intel had released the Minnowboard (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/199-4-...) which seemed like a competitor to the Raspberry Pi, but at 200USD it wouldn't see nearly the uptake the more affordable systems have seen.
This reminds me of the Netbook arms race except the end product is infinitely more useful.