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.

>>80
Every modern BIOS does INT10 calls to display POST messages.  If you think a modern graphics card can do anything but VGA output at 25/28 MHz without calling the video BIOS, you're in for a surprise. No PC with a digital display can so much as set the video mode without that "binary blob".

And don't count out ACPI either. You can't even tell whether your beloved 8254/8259 are even set up in the old fashion without checking for the damn ACPI tables. I'd say booting the CPU and initializing system bus controllers is pretty basic PC programming. The eternal desire to preserve DOS compatibility isn't helping things here.