[jwhite]

Agreed!

Just being a SoC has another advantage: reduced part count, so you can fit more functionality onto a smaller PCBA.

Another commenter mentioned the Cyclone V and Zynq SoCs. My day job is in the telco industry. The equipment vendors we sell to are always pushing for higher and higher densities in their chassis and line cards, and it drives a lot of our design decisions. Chips like the Cyclone V and Zynq help a lot in achieving those aims. Our PCBAs have shrunk dramatically (with increasing functionality) over the last decade.

The continual pressure to reduce costs and power consumption also leads to choices like minimizing the other available system resources (e.g. clocks, memory bandwidth, RAM, flash), which can end up reducing the effectiveness of a GPU.

As with everything in engineering, there are many different problem domains, each with unique constraints dictating different solutions.