Don't know whether there was an update to the fine article, but the article currently seems to mostly refute your points.

> Pine formula is that it reliably gets brand-new hackable devices into the hands of the community at an affordable price point

I guess this depends on the definition of hackable, but the revelation that I got from the article is that Pine actually doesn't operate that way, they just sell the cheapest hardware they can instead of "hackable" hardware.