To say this is a rival is a bit overstated. It costs $299 versus the Pi's $35. Sure, it has more features (1GB RAM, QC CPU, etc.) but the price tag immediately puts it in another class.
Yup, not only is it in another class, but there are at least two classes between them (eg. the $~50-~100 boards like the BeagleBone Black or the exynos 4xxx series up through the $~100-~200 range of the imx6 and exynos 5xxx), etc.
But to be fair to Microsoft, the purpose of this board isn't really anything like the purpose of the Pi, so comparing the two is really just flawed to begin with. It should really be compared to boards like tge Arndale ( http://www.arndaleboard.org/ ) and in that context the price is actually quite reasonable even if you value the the Windows image license at $0.
8.3x more expensive then the PI. Sure its several of orders of magnitude more power then the Pi's weak ARMv6 chip, but jeeze... Also the fact that it ships with secure boot (which can be disabled easily-ish[1]).
Also they suggest kernel debugging over USB, is this common? I know the Linux Kernel's debug and boot messages are normally dump out a serial port (or can be).
