Views on the raspberry pi

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.

>>19
The point is to get started on hardware hacking using one machine that's affordable and easy to modify - the Raspberry Pi. It's a system on a board with built in GPIO and USB connections so it's far easier to use it in a hardware hack than your average x86 machine. The students of hardware hacking don't require high performance machines to learn their craft, a cheap and practical device like the Raspi is designed for this very purpose.

While it's true that there is no datasheet now for the Raspi, there are software hackers out there who care about freedom and will take the effort to study the system for the sake of the community. I'll be givinig 15 years for the community to mature its understanding about the Pi internals - consider how long it took the Nouveau team to develop their system.