If the board doesn't meet your requirements, then don't use it. The MinnowBoard is part of an ecosystem of boards that offer different feature sets at different prices. One differentiator the MinnowBoard has is that its SATA and Gigabit ethernet are powered by PCIexpress, so you're definitely going to see performance reflect that. Likewise, we offer PCIe lanes through our expansion connector, so the MinnowBoard could be interfaced with high-speed hardware (think FPGAs) for all sorts of interesting applications.

I find the comparisons of MinnowBoard with ultra low-cost embedded boards like RasberryPi to be pretty silly. The MinnowBoard is not Intel's version of a RasberyPi. The media may play this up just to generate conflict and to set up a straw man comparison, but I hope people are capable of seeing through that.