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.

>>27
I wouldn't care to use an old $25 PIII, but where will I get the GPIOs?
how fast do you need yo'ure GPIOs to go, and how many pins do you need?

>>26
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.
Unless someone leaks out the datasheet for (at least) the GPU architecture, forget it. Just buy a {beagle,panda,cubie}board or a parallella and be done with it.