The idea of a ready to go FPGA board with working re-usable code/cores/symbols is great and the existing Papilio products represent that well. What this new project does is marry that with the Arduino platform/community and make it even easier to develop with a FPGA. There is nothing wrong with that at all. Adding a real microcontroller with USB frees up quite a bit of the FPGA from running a soft-core like ZPUino while giving extra features like real debugging which isn't available on the Arduino itself.

Saying it isn't all that hard to use FPGAs as a rationale for NOT building a nicely integrated product is funny. It isn't all that hard to use computers either, but I'm guessing you didn't write your own compilers, your own OS from scratch, your own TCP/IP stack, your own web browser etc to get far enough to make your funny post. But datasheets are available. RFCs are available. Reading isn't that hard apparently. I read that somewhere.

Why write your own OS/compilers/protocols/GUI/web browser/blah blah blah when you can re-use well written existing tools and use them to get to the meat of what you want to accomplish. The same is true on the FPGA. Why should some hobbyist with a penchant for authentic C64 audio spend hours learning how to bit-bang code to an FPGA when they could just synthesize a SID core and get to it? Ignoring the fact that there is a whole hell of a lot of work in just "connect the FPGA to your dev board" etc that you're glossing over by making it sound like "just turn the light switch on if you want light, duh!"
 

Have you guys *READ* the BSD license? It has never forced source code to be published. In fact this is the fundamental issue between the BSD license and GPL camps. I am shocked and dismayed to see how many uneducated comments have been made in this thread about the BSD license requiring source code to be published.

Regarding the question of "Can it really be OSX running on the iPhone?", it seems pretty obvious to me. If the iPhone is indeed an ARM chip, then I would *assume* Apple has ported Darwin to this chip. Look at NetBSD for a second. It supports a ton of different ARM chips and platforms. It even supports a *26bit* ARM cpu. (NetBSD/acorn26)

Apple could very easily port Darwin to ARM. Let's assume they have. I still think of my MacBook Pro as running "Mac OSX" even when I have booted it *single user* to the point where I am running Darwin + init + shell and nothing else.

It is a bit of a stretch for Apple to call Darwin "OSX" if they only ported the kernel, but I would believe they have ported significant portions of the higher level OS functionality. E.g. graphics libraries, window server, etc. This is more than enough to call it OSX, even if it is not 100% source compatible with OSX on my Intel machine.

After all my latest and greatest MacOSX 10.4.8 application source code wouldn't work on 10.0 PPC, but 10.0 PPC is *still* OSX no matter what you might think.