Just to give a different perspective, I think booting from SD card is my favorite aspect of the RPi (although I do not disagree with your comment). This is bec

Just to give a different perspective, I think booting from SD card is my favorite aspect of the RPi (although I do not disagree with your comment). This is because I find it gives me easier flexibility in switching between kernels with embedded userlands. I run my OS from RAM with only tmpfs for secondary storage, and I make my SD cards read-only. I do not try to use an SD card like a HDD, but I am aware that many people probably do and I am probably in the minority. In sum, I find booting from the SD card is just easier when developing than constantly re-flashing on-board chips. I doubt that this was the intention behind having the RPi store the bootloader on an SD card, but I am thankfule for it. For ease of development for people like me, if nothing else, I sometimes wish more ARM evaluation boards would provide a similar boot from SD card option (where I choose the bootloader), in addition to on-board flash.