This is kind of underwhelming given that we already have the Raspberry Pi.
Having said that, Acer, ASUS, Lenovo and others make "nettop" devices that are very similar to this one. Generally theirs are cheaper but with 2GB RAM standard and no SSD... for about the same price as this one you could get one of those others plus the extra RAM and a (small) SSD today at the advertised price... just with slightly more work in upgrading the RAM, swapping out the drive and installing Ubuntu yourself.
The extra work seems like a small price to pay though for getting a system right now instead of putting down money and getting a system in 2014. That sort of long lag time to delivery without any sort of associated price break is what killed the Ubuntu Edge phone for me, and I can't see myself investing in this thing either (sorry @shanpc).
Basically you could do this yourself for right around the exact same price point if not a bit cheaper with the minor inconvenience of installing the OS yourself.
And let's face it, these days, if you're not willing to put together a desktop (which you can trivially do at this price point assuming you're willing to make the same price/performance tradeoffs), you're probably not in the market for a desktop, but rather a laptop or a tablet. That's just where the market is at these days.
We looked at the Raspberry Pi, but it provides too little CPU horsepower for most basic computing chores - its hard to run a decent GUI or browse the web on it. Not knocking the Pi one bit here (!), but we think a desktop computer would need a bit more firepower than the Pi.
Also, being a crowdfunded project, we're able to provide this at a price-point that System76, ZaReason and other pre-installed Linux providers aren't able to provide right now (they're great companies too, so do support them if you like Linux pre-installed on your desktops/laptops!)