[pjc50]

One of the original concepts for the Pi was an Atmel-based system that booted into BASIC.

Unfortunately these days you can have simplicity or you can have a web browser but not both. And without a web browser a computer feels extremely limited.

[lisper]

Yeah, this. The simplicity of early computers came with a cost: they couldn't really do very much. You can recapture the essential parts of that simplicity today by, for example, firing up a Python interpreter, which is just as easy to learn as BASIC and much more capable. You can live inside a Python prompt for a very long time before you really start to hit the limits. (Or, even better IMHO, inside a Lisp prompt :-) But the fact of the matter is that the technology that makes modern web sites possible is complicated, and there is just no way around that.