Too bad the price will be over $100 though, not including a DDR4 SODIMM, but that’s the price of Intel. Great to see a well-known boardmaker coming out with an up-to-date x86 option.
Please note that opnsense also exists. It does most (all?) of what pfsense can do but has a much saner organisation and team behind it that doesn't resort to character assassination to promote their product.
I'll spare you the drama but if you care at all, look it up and choose opnsense rather than pfsense.
I've never had realtek network hardware that wasn't unstable under load on linux.
I still prefer Intel NICs, but IIRC, Realtek works just fine now. The new network antichrist is "Killer" WiFi NICs
For me they have been rock-solid using Debian for many years across different generations of Realtek NICs.
On the other hand I have experienced no end of issues with Intel 82574L, e.g. http://blog.krisk.org/2013/02/packets-of-death.html and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1730550
now it's the same price of any itx board. with the same high power profile.
for the last 4 years anyone could spend $40 on a itx board with 12v power input, plus $40 for a fully featured ia64 AMD5350 APU, and have exactly what you describe for 35W (or 55 under load)
I wouldn't normally comment on something like this, but I noticed this mistake twice in the linked post as well. ia64 refers to Itanium, while amd64/x86-64/x64 refer to the 64-bit version of x86.
Now, in the x86 space both of those things (software support, reliability) are not an issue. Besides, there are much cheaper options available on the market (e.g. https://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/cSJOvljS , same platform with 4GB ddr4, 64gb emmc, case, power supply for ~$140 shipping included).
So I reckon you're right, this product won't be too successful.