Alternative SBCs have started adding onboard eMMC, USB 3.0, and GigE; while they’re still not desktop PCs, having faster IO makes tinkering so much less annoying (for many applications). I hope if anything, the next Pi has Gigabit.
I have rather a lot of them, at home and work. For me, quality and standards count.
Nowadays Pis are made in Wales (by Sony). They are designed by a British foundation. To all intents and purposes they are a British computer that fulfils a particular niche rather well. No, the Pi3 does not have GBE or SATA but it is (in my opinion) a piece of kit that you can trust to not set fire to your cat.
The fastest low-cost networking board right now (that I can find) is the espressobin, built around the Marvell Armada chipset. It's got three full-duplex GigE ports that can actually run as such as well as pci-E and SATA. Unfortunately it's oriented toward routers and stuff so it lacks HDMI, so no good for home entertainment.
Problem with these: I can never be sure what level of acceleration for video playback is supported - and in what quality. The Pi is pretty rock solid in that department. Also, the Pi has by far the biggest community and extensive documentation, and I can rely on there still being Pis available in years, compared to the Chinese outfits where no one knows how long they'll stay in market.
Also Pine64[2] is supposed to be suitable for HTPC (Kodi) usage but I haven’t tried it and YMMV.
I <3 RouterBoards + MikroTik.
(Aside from that, I’d really like if all models had a serial console over USB, and perhaps a small amount of built-in flash memory to avoid the need for a MicroSD card in some cases)