A big glossy launch at CES with no details does absolutely nothing for my project. When an NXP or STMicro rep comes into the office and shows me what's new, maybe drops off a devkit...that's useful.
The NUC/stick are the same, and the Surfaces are Microsoft's way of pushing their OEMs forward. Nexus/Pixel is Google's same realization that they cant just provide one component and pray for third parties to deliver consistent top tier products. These companies create a specific component (processors, Windows, Android) and then release a reference to prevent a race to the bottom. If an OEM cant beat the reference, consumers will buy it instead.
And their reference devices are generally poor...it's not hard for OEM's to beat them.
note - I was an intel employee, but on the software side.
They want wins like automotive platforms. That's really the upcoming battleground. NXP/Freescale has a very strong hold in that area though, which is why Qualcomm bought them.
Also, on the forums you'd see old and nagging bugs with basic operations like getting the networking up and running without having problems because by default usb0 owned the default route.
You'd think that Intel would have addressed these things. Eventually, I decided to not trust Intel. I was worried that they would stop supporting the platform and leave me hanging, having spent thousands of hours building a solution around it.
Now we can see that they're off on a new platform. I won't be spending any time with it.
As a linux system-on-module, it doesn't seem badly priced for low quantities/one offs. Although for a little more you can get an arm SOM that has display capabilities.
I had a better time as a dev with arduino Yun but it was way too limited (memory and flash) for what I wanted.
While they have been producing endless press releases about "makers" and "IoT" in the last couple of years, they still charge $4k+ for a usb vid (and prohibit sharing) as part of the usb if [0]. So yes, I wouldn't expect much change.