What are your guys views, on the raspberry pi? Tons of kids in my school are like "OMG IT'S LIKE A COMPOOTER YOU CAN PROGRAM YOURSELF LOOK I MADE IT SAY HELLO WORLD IN PYTHON" now don't get me wrong, everyone needs to start somewhere, it's just why with this, what's wrong with just installing linux on your laptop, it's just a slow linux computer. As far as I can tell it's only use is teaching intermediate programmers lower level stuff when they start using the GPIO pins and such.
It's feasible to furnish a whole class of students with a standard machine
Guess what, there already IS a "standard machine". It's called a PC! You can get used hardware for free and people learning programming do NOT need the latest and greatest, 2-3 year old machines are getting thrown out all the time by some wasteful bastards! In fact that's already far faster (P4/Core/i7 level) than they should ever be starting with - a 486 or Pentium is more like it. Encourages them to actually write efficient code.
The RPi is a 100% proprietary smartphone SoC. I'm almost disappointed that someone didn't leak a datasheet yet. In a few years when it goes out of production maybe some people will hack it and get more life out, but otherwise they're just going to end up in landfills just like smartphones, and no one will know any more about how to use them.
A PC isn't like that. You can get documentation on just about any part on them or the architecture freely long after they're obsolete. Parts are standardised and interchangeable and the standards are pretty open too. Some things like GPUs are not documented completely but that's where backwards compatibility comes to the rescue. A GTX 680 will work as a standard VGA card if you want to program it and the docs for IBM VGA are everywhere. BIOS is mostly a blob but you don't need to use it, since the hardware is so well documented.
If you really want ARM take a look at TI OMAP. There is really no "standard ARM architecture", all the peripherals are different on each system.