I'd say this is a fair assessment of the project. It came off as overambitious with a number of high-risk project management decisions made at the expensive of a minimum-viable initial product. And this was just looking at it from an engineering point of view, ignoring whether it did actually provide value over other options for educational spending in developing countries.

Funny enough it seems like the hype it generated was its main contribution, which led to the netbook product segment and ultimately Chromebooks. I'd say its spiritual descendent is the humble grades 7-12 school chromebook with much more conventional hardware and software choices. The killer app for school Chromebooks is the combination of Google Docs and whatever Google's classroom management software is, provided cheap to schools in a long-game move by Google to hook a future generation on their office suite. Ironically, despite the very agressive price points of sub-$200 Chromebooks, their current market is limited to the US and the wealthier Commonwealth nations.