The real game-changer to me was the eMMC slot. SD cards are just so pitifully slow that it's unbearable to ever do any kind of disk IO on the pi. Even running apt-get update took forever.
[1]: https://samhobbs.co.uk/2013/10/speed-up-your-pi-by-booting-t...
Judging by the built-in eMMC on the Orange Pi, it's a substantial I/O boost, at least 4-8x faster than even the best microSD card.
I bought a CubieTruck (Allwinner A20) and a SATA SSD drive simply because it seemed to be the only cheap ARM board with decent I/O performance.
So that mixed with the iffy licensing[1], I don't see a bright future for their chips/mainstream acceptance.
In fact, if we're talking ethics and politics now, there's also labor, abuse of workers and local people losing their jobs to cheap overseas workers issues.
Then again, I don't have time these days to thoroughly research ideological aspects of all the stuff I buy. I bought a CubieTruck, not a tray of Allwinner chips. I'm sure that if you looked up track records of all supliers involved in any hardware product these days, you would find plenty that violated GPL at some point.
I admire people that can say that they checked everything and that their laptops don't run any binary blobs and have no relations to known copyleft violators. I simply think my time is better spent in other pursuits.
I read that faster eMMC chips were released, but I don't have any figure.
It's a neat little device. I had a real-hard time getting Android working properly, but it was well worth the effort once it was.