I once chose the BeagleBoard for a startup's product prototype. It had just the right hardware features, ran Linux, part price ok (esp since only needed 1-3 at most, on near term horizon), plus the "not tested/blessed for commercial public embedded projects" was not a showstopper for a demo prototype. If I had a similar need today I'd prob choose the RaspPi, due to combo of lower price and bigger community. But RaspPi had not been out back then.