[janekm]

It's very competitive for applications that can make good use of the programmable IO feature. Other chips with similar capabilities are substantially more expensive.

It's also clearly going to have a great developer community building up around it, which has great value in itself.

It's also great value as a "easy to integrate cheap module" which is what they initially pitched it as.

Of course these days many applications need a wireless interface (wifi/BLE) and you can get competitive parts at similar prices to the RP2040 (ESP32 or a BLE MCU).

[sonium]

I guess they could have added the RPi WiFi chip for about USD 1.5 in BOM cost (assuming common industry prices based on distributor price/quantity matrix)

[janekm]

It would probably make more sense to add an ESP32 rather than a BCM4335 like on the RPi since that chip is intended to run with a full host OS and needs a large binary driver blob (yes the ESP32 also has a binary blob).

Either way it's no longer cost effective.