It's a bit weird to me that they're going with intel, is the new i7 better than ryzen processors if you count in energy efficienty (and thermal output)?
Electrical engineering. Getting a working PCB design for a modern CPU, especially in tight space constraints, is quite challenging.
It's probably something we will do in the v2 (the NUC solution has its drawbacks in terms of exposed IO and such), but I'm glad we don't have to do a full design immediately; only the carrier board that routes the NUC compute element to whereever we need it.
Intel also has the NUC compute element solution which significantly simplifies the EE and allows for a seamless upgrade to e.g. Alder Lake.