Most of those examples were tech demonstrators and reference designs, AFAIK. A small number of units, if any, were available. I don't recall many partners bringing them to market. Intel's not in the business of selling a couple thousand of these units, they're looking for OEMs to pick it up and sell millions. Or at least shape/gauge the future market.
Exactly. Intel seems to be mainly interested in selling more processors and motherboards to OEMs than anything else. Intel seems to intervene on occasion to shake things up or show OEMs how its done. For eg., the Ultrabook was to help laptop manufacturers who were getting clobbered by Apple. NUC was so that OEMs would build competitors (like the Gigabyte BRIX Pro) to the Mac Mini and so on.
