It's also a compelling choice if you need to operate in a resource-constrained environment. I don't know what kind of hardware is in Hawking's system nowadays,

It's also a compelling choice if you need to operate in a resource-constrained environment. I don't know what kind of hardware is in Hawking's system nowadays, but back when this was first being built a low-power portable system that runs a higher-activity WPF UI smoothly could have been fairly expensive.