>>25
Affordable? Can't beat
free. Easy to modify? An SBC where everything is soldered together, compared to a standard desktop PC?
I'll be givinig 15 years for the community to mature its understanding about the Pi internals
Broadcom isn't going to keep producing the '2835 for 15 years so anything they learn won't really have any applicability anymore.
>>26,31
The SoC itself, duh. And who says smartphones can't have powerful GPUs?
>>29
If it leaks whoever did it will be very easily tracked down. Have you looked at the one they did release publicly? Those spelling errors and omissions are intentional. They create a fingerprint that allows them to know who got what. Some of the register addresses might be at different places for the same device across different datasheets. Not saying it won't happen but as Broadcom loves lawyers and the only motivation to do it would be for lulz, I don't see it being that simple.
>>35
Wrong. The "legacy" hardware is there as a fail-safe fallback. Something like a 8259 or 6845 costs basically NOTHING on a modern deep sub-micron process. The testing required is minimal since this stuff isn't new at all - it's well-known, stable and mature.
>>37
Hardware differences don't matter all that much if you're treating the machine like a standard PC.