Interestingly from the Commercial side, it is very different. If you've got a single board computer as part of your product and you are a going concern with the necessary legal NDAs and what not in place, the manufacturer will send one of their engineers to sit in your cube an pair program with you until your system is running the way you want. They will create custom releases of their binary blobs that do the things you need them to do in order to make you successful. That is so that your product ships and you start ordering a million a month of their product.
On the flip side there aren't too many really "open" SoCs, not like the old days where the data sheets told you everything. So things are a bit more challenging. I had hopes for the Zync series from Xilinx as they had the potential to be the basis for a good "common processor" base, a dual ARM 9 enough FPGA fabric to make a classic frame buffer, etc. But the number of people who want that sort of system is measured in the thousands, not the millions. No way to make a living at it, no way to sell it for what it would cost to support.
Intel has been bending over a lot however in order to try to take share from ARM. So they will talk to hobbyists about their smallest computers. The Galileo, compute stick, what have you. So there is an opportunity there, for the moment they are aligned with anyone trying to give them exposure.