I've tried a lot of different development boards, and my experience has been that the OS, drivers, and available software resources make more of a difference fo

I've tried a lot of different development boards, and my experience has been that the OS, drivers, and available software resources make more of a difference for the kind of projects most people use these for. RPi and their community did a great job of making it straightforward to setup and connect things, even when some extra hardware was necessary. I had the opposite experience with multiple versions of the Beagle board, where there were numerous software driver issues and endless half baked guides on using the hardware. I hope that the CHIP boards follow their example, otherwise I'd be very wary of touted benefits like pre-soldered headers and a newer ARM chip instead of "our mission requires it to be easy to use".