RaspberryPi is $200.
"on sale at $599"
That's a sale? I guess 1 good thing about this is that if you really wanted an ARM based device to develop on then, a year from now there will be Chinese clones at half the price.
The Raspberry Pi is $200 for the 8GB model, in reality, not fantasy MSRP. So for $400 LESS you might only miss that "NPU" but, how powerful is that NPU anyhow?