Outside political influences I would see ARM SoCs as a much better fit in this space. While power consumption isn't an issue directly it is an issue indirectly

Outside political influences I would see ARM SoCs as a much better fit in this space. While power consumption isn't an issue directly it is an issue indirectly in the form of heat and coincidentally cooling. A device without a fan is desirable from a noise perspective in a living-room, a cost stand point and a "sex appeal" standpoint (pretty case, tiny or no power brick, etc). ARM systems can also be generally cheaper to implement as with many SoCs there is no "chip set" just the single SoC and a couple auxiliary parts. Few parts and fewer traces generally results in a cheaper product. I would _think_ but certainly don't know that maintaining a single set of optimized drivers would also be a win. As many of the ARM SoCs share sub-components with the SoCs used already on android. Thus there is a cost win in being able to use existing drivers. On the other hand anyone that has used linux on Intel GMA video knows there are some "issues" with those devices and since android sits on linux, I would assume they had to do a bunch of custom work to get it working well (or maybe its just an X11 thing).