[lucozade]

This was precisely the concern that led Eben Upton to develop the Raspberry Pi.

The idea was to make a cheap, small, device that booted to a prompt so that you interacted with it in the same way that you would have interacted with the DOS prompt. You could then have a few of these in schools etc so children could play with it without the concern that they would brick an expensive piece of kit.

It's clearly ended up vastly more successful than was originally envisaged. It remains to be seen, of course, whether it has inspired another generation of hackers or not.