I think this is another example of how Raspberry Pi Foundation's decision not to move forward with a gazillion different boards, but rather to stick with A and B and let the software evolve, was a good one.
I'm very excited to see what the next year brings.
Different development boards (like the Beaglebone Black) are already more open, but get much less attention. The Raspberry Pi has an enormous amount of mindshare, but they've been doing a pretty poor job until now of shifting the status quo of this industry.
Yea with this happening I think what I would love is a bit more cpu power on the pi. Not even the new 64bit arm cores or anything but an A-15 or A-9 at double the MHz of the existing PI would put it in a huge sweetspot for embedded performance and make it far more usable for a desktop (with ideally more ram too but that's always good).
To be fair, the Pi opened the floodgates in terms of ARM boards; there are now loads of them.. not $25 but nothing like the insane pre-pi prices. The beaglebone black from TI is a good step up: 1Ghz A8 (~2x rPi performance), 1GB ram, $45. They don't really need to segment themselves (yet), as others can fill in the gaps.
The ability to boot a kernel with USB (and thus Ethernet) running. Probably not display in the first instance (we're hella-resource-constrained), but we'd want to add that later on.
I'm very excited to see what the next year brings.