I really don't feel that way about my Android smartphone. Mobile operating systems are an experience as far from the console experience of freedom as one can get. This looks like exactly the device that I'd like to carry around with me and I think I've finally found that project to use my spare Raspberry Pi for.

If I didn't want to make the occasional voice call, I'd be absolutely satisfied with replacing my smartphone with something like this.

Yes; and "terminalIDE" includes busybox to fill in the missing commands, vim, tmux, git, javac and gcc. It's fun, usable, but limited: you have to work around a few things.

Wintel is making a push, with extra cheap quad-core Atoms and Windows 8. I wonder if this might be easier to get full linux on?

BTW: The big problem with proper linux distributions on ARM/Atom is not not getting them to run, but power management.

Does it have a real keyboard?