Fair number of commenters here justifiably laments over Micro:bit not resembling a "real" computers despite matching and exceeding specs of ZX-Spectum and other late 70s - early 80s microcomputers. Fair enough, good point.

But consider this: we have quite a lot of those "not quite computers" a.k.a. microcontrollers around us nowadays - there is one in a washing machine, several in a car, complete with a network to talk to each other [1], etc... Many are to be found in quite unexpected places: inside an SD card [2], in every PC keyboard, in a bluetooth headset, inside your phone's touchscreen controller [3], or same phone's wifi/bluetooth chip, etc..

Would it maybe be a good thing to expose kids (and adults alike) to a general idea of having deeply embedded turing-complete devices, together with giving some hands-on experience with them?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus

[2] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

[3] http://www.atmel.com/products/touchsolutions/touchscreens/