Nintendo Wii has a 729 MHz CPU and 88 MB of RAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (not that you can directly compare CPUs by clock speed).

They probably will at some point, but for now plenty of CPU and RAM for many tasks. There are plenty of other boards based around faster CPUs armv7 or x86 if that's what you need.

I had a beagleboard http://beagleboard.org/beagleb... , $125, though about £120 GBP to order in the UK. So switching to the pi gave me something smaller, cheaper, more reliable (I had various issues with the USB on the BB), with ethernet and accessible GPIOs.

Beaglebone Black is quite nice, and closer in price to Pi, but I have not personally made any projects where it would be an advantage over a Pi. I for the Pi that I use as a desktop (mostly with just a bunch of terminals SSHed to big machines), it might be a bit faster, but I'd need to add a USB hub to connect a mouse and keyboard.

They released the docs http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-b...

You can run several non-linux OSs on it RISC OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Plan 9. Or you could write your own http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projec...

Many tasks,
http://hackaday.com/tag/raspbe...
http://makezine.com/category/e...
Seems to me like thousands of people are finding interesting things to do. Of course it is not fast enough for everything, but nor is my i7 laptop, or the 48core server box I use at work.

Small. Ok, that's relative. Its been fine for my uses, smaller than the beagleboard and mini-itx boards I used before. The A+ is even smaller. Interested to know what project you are doing where the pi is too big and too slow, what do you use instead?

Cheap. sorry if $25/$35 is too expensive. Its a quarter the price of the beaglebaord that I used before. Maybe you can find something cheaper for your specific task.

Widely available. In the UK there are several high street shops with it in stock, and lots of online retailers.

Documentation. Personally GPU docs don't interest me (though they are now released, so its the most open arm SoC). When I have wanted to use the pi in a project I have found lots of documentation and tutorials to help me.

Well supported. 2.5 years after release they are still doing regular software updates, including big things like wayland support. Compared to lots of hardware that is released with some old distro image that never gets any updates.

So yes the raspberrypi is awesome. It lets lots of people do interesting things at a good price. Sure for certain things an atmega, beaglebaord, banana pi, gumstix, galileo, an old pc or something else might be better.

Interesting board if you don't need all the features and performance of the pi. Though it says "Since this is early stage of development, no documentation is available".

Arduino has 2k of RAM and people do all sorts of interesting things with it. rpi is definitely not suitable for everything, but is already overkill for many tasks people use it for.