Unless the architecture has changed drastically from the earlier Epiphany, they can't be virtualised like that, and each core are way too slow to be suitable for lambda except for software written specifically to take advantage of the parallelism of the architecture.

You still need to recompile code for the new architecture, and taking full advantage of it wisely is not easy... but may be worth it in many use cases. Part of the problem is that it's not 100% clear which use cases these are and how to market it. Probably unit calculation per watt is the most likely performance advantage, but it's still amazingly hard to sell people on that sometimes