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.

>>46
What threat could the Raspi possibly pose without network access?
None, except you can't use it for anything even remotely sensitive. So forget about using it as a dumbed down PC. Forget about using it as a little development/text-editor machine since you can't sign your code since that would require putting your GPG private key on it and that's not a good idea.