I wonder how much of a difference it would make if Intel made and sold boards that were identical in size and price to the Raspberry Pi and were full systems for hacking and/or IoT development. I think that would be a wildly popular item.
Intel is culturally incapable of doing long-attention-span products. They only succeed with fire-and-forget products. Sustained effort over the long haul is just not in their DNA.
Exactly Intel's problem with these things. They are always too expensive compared to the competition. It's the #1 reason they failed in mobile, too. Their similar performance Atom chips cost 2x more than the highest-end Arm chip.
Galileo was as close as they came to a home run though. It really was their run at a Rasp-pi-alike, but it was almost twice as expensive, wasn't compatible with the Rasp-Pi headers (though it oddly was with Arduino, which seemed like a real design impedance mismatch), and was lacking numerous peripherals like video out.
They had a similar problem with that whole Maker-targeted series of chips - they couldn't seem to decide if they wanted to capture the ease of use of Arduino or the deep integrator capabilities of these target-specific MCUs and really failed to split the difference.
They also failed to take into account that they were very much the minority player and any sort of entry into those markets would be a war of attrition and not just overnight success... and the billion dollar juggernaut did what billion dollar juggernauts do to side projects that aren't overnight successes - they killed it before anyone could even develop competence working with them.
Both Edison and Quark really had niches they could have well serviced, if they had given it a real try... but it was very apparent that management wasn't interested and the designers didn't understand who they were targeting.
It seems that strangely they can't do that on newer field.
History doesn't always repeat, but it sure does rhyme. There's a lot of parallels here to Microsoft and the PC industry.
And make sure their fabs can deliver at volume without breaking them, which is iffy - every Atom wafer sold is one less Xeon wafer to sell.
I've been thinking of how to build educational clusters with chips like these (current candidate is the Octavo SoM that a TI Sitara core, RAM, some flash, an SD controller and two Ethernet ports) that could have a couple dozen nodes, connected by one or two Ethernet switches, all assembled on a single PCB. A bit like the Pine 64 Sopine clusters, but with more, simpler nodes. The built in Flash can be used to network boot the node, eliminating a large cost in external flash.
The biggest advantage of RaspPi is the Linux support. Install and play.
Atom? Only recently it started to run without hopelessly freezing and a whole lot of patches on top of mainline kernel.