I hadn't seen that. There are lots of research oriented robotics projects that use Apple Mac Minis for compute power. You just bolt on a Mini and you have a standard environment to run computer vision, learning, or advanced path planning, communicating with the robot's own computers by UDP, for example. NUC could be a nice intermediate point between the Mini and full integration with the robot's own computers.
NUC is nice, I measure mine at less than 10 watt for "smash the CPU" tasks, small form factor, good alternative to ridiculously expensive options like car PCs. I found it's also voltage tolerant. It's rated at 19v but you can run it at much less (down to 15).
EDIT: it does go up to nearly 20 watts, depending, esp if you have the HDMI plugged in. Technically I think you can get more out of a NUC than a mini in terms of raw MIPs. They're PCs, not toys like RPI.
Thanks for the info. For the robotics use case I mentioned, having a high-performance system is important because the algos are demanding, so a RPI would not be very good.