I think this will partly depend on who has been donating. How many of these are developers who want this to develop on, how many are hackers who want some nice open hardware to build something else on top of and how many are general gamers who just want a new console?
It's possible that they ship the kickstarter units once they have finished development but that is more or less it and actual orders0 drop quickly to almost nothing.
The incumbents have several advantages over this:
They have deep wallets and are able to subsidize their consoles heavily (and already do). For example they could offer a sale price for an XboX at around the time that this is released so that the price difference becomes negligible.
They have retail space, even though many would say that retail is dying. Walking past a high street shop that advertised a particular product will certainly increase the perceived legitimacy of that product in the public eyes. They can also use this hook to wrestle things like this out of the physical retail space.
It's going to be hard to persuade AAA developers to develop for this, partly because it is so "hackable". If this does gain some popularity then it's likely that neighbourhood teenage geeks will do a nice business in taking these consoles, putting custom firmware on them to bypass whatever DRM and installing hundreds of torrented games on them, for some ridiculously cheap fee like $30. XboX gets around this problem by deliberately making this difficult and risky (having to do a hardware mod, risking loss of XboX Live service , voiding warranty on a device with perceived reliability issues).
As an example of this a PayTV service was launched in the UK some years ago but the hardware was made very easy to hack so it was possible to make it able to subscribe to all premium channels without paying for them. They eventually went out of business because the majority of their customers had hacked boxes.
All the titles they are gunning for appear to be indie titles, the problem is that most successful Indie titles will end up on Xbox etc anyway since MS , Sony etc are enabling digital distribution. Unless this can get a massive install base it's likely that Indie devs will only target it as a secondary platform and will concentrate on XboX etc first.
It's difficult to think of a way to sell this device on it's merits to an "average consumer" beyond being slightly cheaper than an XBox (but not cheaper than a second hand one). The only pitch I can think of would be "you can run pirate games on this". Piracy is also a big part of the reason that the PC was such a successful games platform, I remember the arguments at school between console and PC gamers and one frequently trotted out in favour of the PC was "the hardware costs more , but the games are free because we just copy the disks".