With things like this I'd rather wait for the 2nd or 3rd run anyways. They are a small group who are doing this on a shoestring budget for a price point with a tiny profit margin and targeting a highly technical audience; I won't be shocked if there are some small hardware bugs that make it past QA in the first run.
Its worth the waiting a little bit to let them iron all that out.
I was thinking about this, but given they've got an OS running, it is good enough for £20, and I'll replace it when necessary.
You can have an OS running and not have it 100% stable for long term with small latent bugs. I've actually got a prototype board I'm working on right now that runs Linux just fine but will lock up and need to be rebooted every few days.