This is an awesome board for embedded development. Not as powerful or I/O rich as the Beaglebone Black, but add $6 worth of CAN transceiver chips and a 12V->5V switching power supply and you've got an incredibly powerful automotive compute unit. The Pi 1 was a bit underpowered for what I'm doing, and this might hit the sweet spot while dropping $35 off my unit cost for small quantities. None of the issues you mention affect that calculation at all.

Who uses ethernet anymore?