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.

>>35,43
Wrong. The BIOS code that allows legacy emulation modes to work changes with each new generation of chipset. Regressions in compatibility code are incredibly common, and rarely fixed. If you're a hardware vendor, there's little incentive to find or fix bugs that don't impede booting the latest generation of Windows.

Also, no "standard PC" has really existed since the XT was released in 1983. There are scads of undocumented quirks and generational nits (Mode X, the VGA latch flip flop status bit, the ever changing contents of the EBDA) that make bare metal programming PC family machines a real pain.