well
@Nelson Muntz as i understand it ; someone within the education system / ICT side Cambridge noted that students seemed to be less knowledgeable than previous years. It was probably part of the marketing for the PI in that they said lets make a PC where you can actually see the motherboard ..
Then i think a sort of sheep mentality kicked in and it became a sort of fashion to use the PI. Now i was involved with an NGO Ghana that used computers to educate kids. So i took a couple of PI's with me. AT the time i also shipped about 20 ex-military panasonic alumin cased toughbook laptops, that only had .512gig ram. the first thing i decided was that Pi's were no good for the 3rd world- the PI had only a HMDI port. Thats meant i since i din't ship any monitors finding monitors with a HMDI connection. in Ghana - there were none only VGA . Then there was the capability of the PI quite frankly not that great .
On the toughbook laptops i did before travelling manage to buy compatible ram for the old machine with an extra .512 g ram and managed to install Antix- several of those got donated to a childrens hospital.
My conclusion for 3rd world was simply to get hold of anything around Pentium IV or better with 2 gig of ram and then there was a lot of potential to do things. Those types of PC towers which although dusty arev much in abundance on markets such as laPaz etc
The only thing i can see the PI has that sat an old Pentium IV tower does not are the pins.
In terms of educating kids i found that taking an old defunct PC tower apart and let them handle the mother board etc was just as educational as a small motherboard in a bit of see through plastic. ARM architecture might be the future but as of to date the PI holds little interest. I see similarities in requirement of schools using microsoft as to those that are Pi mad. I guess thats probably a bit harsh in that there was a quantum jump in that at least PC's went from OS Microsoft to OS Linux. Also i've seen statments along the lines of PI's are cheap - not really compared to an old but still good Pentium IV and above. So for me a would rather buy a tower from ebay and use it to play with than sa new PI.
At the end of the day you pays your money and takes your choice.