That's my perception as well. TFA is clear this is a partner-driven thing, so I suspect DeepComputing drove most of this (obviously with some collaboration from FW though). Win/win for all involved!
It's great to see partner ecosystem developing! Framework is such an exciting company.
An end goal of targeting RISC-V is better for everyone than targeting ARM or x86. No licensing fees, manufacturers could design their own silicon and be completely royalty free, etc...
Right now we are nowhere near that. RISC-V software and hardware is not very mature at all. But much of this can change very quickly once products launch.
Maybe just the availability and maturity of that particular SoC, the PineTab-V tablet uses the same one. An obvious ARM SoC to use in a laptop is the RK3588.
It's a way for other companies to piggyback off of Framework rather than the other way around, while strengthening the Framework ecosystem.