Well the Pi had a good run, honestly longer than I thought it would but the big boys have entered the arena now.
Also imagine what the prices on services like kimsufi and online.net will look like once these guys have hundreds of thousands of them rack mounted. Good times to come.
The Pi has advantages that are not easily overcome by this:
Price: $25 for a Model A. Yes, it delivers significantly less - but at $25, it's a consumable for projects, whereas at $100 the Minnow probably isn't. $35 iff you want Network and another USB port and some more memory.
Community: If you want to do anything with the Pi, you'll likely found someone who has documented doing something very similar, and probably uploaded their source code.
Peripherals: There are a lot of them for the Pi, relatively cheap.
I think the Minnow Max will carve its own (smaller, but still nontrivial) niche, but will not actually harm RPi's market share.
I started writing a RoR medical office application. Then I thought what if I wanted every patient to have an RFID card and perform measurements (BP, Weight, etc.).
I found an RPi + Arduino project with peripherals, manuals and all I could ask. That I can handle, building everything from scratch (from software to hardware) would take a tremendous amount of time (due to lack of expertise on my part).
So as you said, even if you get me an x86 board at 50 USD I'd still go for Arduino.
I can recommend the Pi to someone who has never used Linux before because there are so many resources available that are Pi-specific. It's the same reason I recommend Ubuntu for newbies even though I prefer other distros for myself.
Not to mention Arduino seems to have shown commitment to their pinout configuration. I seriously doubt later iterations of this board will retain compatibility.
Maybe, don't forget that the objective of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has always been education, and keeping the same hardware platform for a longer period of time, eschewing participation in a hardware arms race, works well for this objective (in terms of building learning materials for teachers around R-Pi etc).
That said I think they have said that there will be an R-Pi too sooner it later, 2015 perhaps?
But do note that it is a "community price, one for customer" only offer. I doubt they are losing money on it, but I suspect you'd have to buy a few hundreds (or maybe thousands) to get that price if you actually want to build something around it.
This board costs 3 times the RPi (model B), it's not comparable. It's x86 so the premium price is justified IMHO, BUT it's not really comparable with a 25 USD board.
Maybe true for a personal user, but not for a business.
If you're not basing a product around it, the parts cost is trivial compared to the engineering time cost. If you want just one (or a handful) for a one-off project, $25 and $75 are "the same" to any sane business for this. The team will likely spend more on coffee than controllers/SBCs in the course of development.
While I agree with you, my experience is that most businesses don't recognize your definition of sane. My office decided that providing ink pens was too high of an expense.
The Pi uses 2 watts [1], this uses 5. There are a lot of uses where that 3 watts can be rather significant. They both have niches, and it's going to be interesting to see which one this carves out.
Also imagine what the prices on services like kimsufi and online.net will look like once these guys have hundreds of thousands of them rack mounted. Good times to come.