I'm not really surprised. The quark co-processor was disabled in the devkit when it first launched. It took a year or so to get that cleared up and last I looked at the edison quark documentation wasn't great. That kinda killed what differentiated the devkit from yet another linux devboard. 5V IO on the first devkit also seems like an odd choice.

As a linux system-on-module, it doesn't seem badly priced for low quantities/one offs. Although for a little more you can get an arm SOM that has display capabilities.