The Chinese Linux on an ARM USB stick devices are now a lot more powerful for the same price as the Pi. Only reason to go for the Pi is the large community and manufacturer support. I think the makers envisioned school kids all being given their own Pis to take home and hack on like they did with the BBC computers their rich parents bought for them in the 80s, but in practice the Pi seems to be mostly used as a curiousity in the classroom and doesn't do anything they couldn't do with their existing PCs.
Without more details I have to disagree, based on anecdotal evidence. I own two Pis, those are awesome and do their respective jobs very well (one's a tiny server, the other runs OpenElec/xbmc).
I looked at 'upgrades', got myself an ODROID U3. That thing's collecting dust here. HDMI output is unusable for me (there's no way to compensate braindead overscan issues). Running Android on that thing seems pointless (I dare you to try and use Android with a usb keyboard only, for example..) and projects around that thing are .. not polished. To put it mildly.
My favorite was a supposed replacement for the Pi's xbmc distributions that spawned an X server, launching a WM and than started xbmc from the menu with some sort of UI automation. You could watch that happen, because it was running dead slow. This was the 'best' (as in, most loved acc. to the community boards) XBMC/media center solution.
For me, with my limited exposure, the Pi is excellent. I won't order a random potential replacement again without _really_ good reviews. Price and/or technical specs don't automatically make a decent device.
That's a huge draw for me as well. After the Pi I got some Arduinos, they are very non-scary and really really fun to play with. Both pieces of hardware have their uses, the Pi is much, much more powerful and standalone, but less embedded (I use the Arduino as a USB peripheral, which you can't do with a Pi):
After reading yesterday's HN thread on Broadcom's RPi video driver source and seeing the ratio of the word "education" to the word "Quake" equal 0.0, I'd have to agree.
In fact the Debian wiki has alternatives to the Raspberry Pi that are more open (although with the recent open sourcing of the videocore driver, things have improved compared to the list on the wiki):
https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi
A lot of old articles (some as early as 2011) have been popping up in the popular list on BBC News. In the past this had been due to it suddenly being shared on social networks although I can recall one occasion when it displayed a list of the most popular articles from exactly one month before.
