For others that didn't notice this new and somewhat less expensive version come out, here's the HN thread from 2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17124593
Only in the sense that the Atlantic Ocean has "somewhat less water" than the Pacific. :-) Over $4K for a "desktop development system". That's not personal computing. That's small scale enterprise computing, which is too small a market to make a dent in Intel and AMD. Their prices need to come down by an order of magnitude to make this technology a significant player.
Which config are you talking about?
Here is the special DD2.1 box https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TLSDS1/intro.html for $1600.
You mentioned the base CPU not having HW speculative execution mitigations (which I also would consider worth a CPU upgrade to get), but not having virtualization is a much bigger limitation, in my view, and you didn't mention that, so I did.