The people working on this like to hang out at #raspberrypi-internals on Freenode.
(Disclaimer: the last I looked into this was in January, before the Raspberry Pi 2 came out)
Although PCs are becoming more closed and blobby with each new generation, the legacy of backwards-compatibility means that a lot of things still work like they used to - in the days when documentation was far more open. IBM released the PC with full schematics and source code for the BIOS. The RPi was released with nothing more than its software and a few very incomplete datasheets.
Um, no they didn't. The BIOS was very much a blob. Compaq spent a significant amount of resources reverse-engineering the BIOS, which made the IBM-PC-compatible market possible.
Starts on page 337.
They did it for the AT too (page 161):
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibmpcat150ferenceMar84...