I work for the micro:bit Foundation, who have taken ownership of the project on from the BBC - great to see some love on HN for this! There's more at http://microbit.org but for the Hacker News audience you're probably interested in http://tech.microbit.org though ;). There's even a reference design to make your own microbit-derived designs.
One minor comment - the article really made me want one, and when I went to the home page, it took me around five or six clicks to get to a place where I can buy one! Finally I found it at the very bottom of the page under "About". And even then when I click on the adafruit one and it takes me to the adafruit homepage. Why not have a giant button on the homepage? Do you folks really not want people to buy your stuff? :-)
We'll be hiring tech people again soon, so if you want to come and help us teach kids around the world to be inventors, keep your eye on https://micro-bit-educational-foundation.workable.com/
Finally, as the author hoped, the revision of the hardware now shipping is more resilient to ESD than the previous one :)