The website has nice eye-candy and flash, but organization and presentation of hard facts, specs, and data is in short supply.
It's Broadcom, what'd you expect? Ask for more detailed information (e.g. GPIO rise times) and you'll be told in a very roundabout way, "no". (They'll try to play the "you don't need to know", "it's too complicated for you to know", etc. lines - these are people wanting to learn.
) Try asking harder and they'll just lock the thread. The forums are highly moderated to suppress any straying from the official line.
That camera thread is just...
. He's basically advocating vendor lockdown.
'jamesh' is a total prick in many of his other posts on the forum too where people ask for more information.
All this, in a board designed for
education, just
disgusts me beyond belief and makes me think the whole thing is just marketing for Broadcom.</rant>
Arduino is much better in that full documentation is available, you can use as much or as little of it as you want and won't be told otherwise. But the best computer for education is just a standard PC - tons of them are getting thrown away every day in fully working condition(!), many of them far more powerful than the Pi, and you can find far more information about programming PCs from low-level hardware and up, plus there's lots of software available. Even open-source BIOS replacements are available. Parallel ports (which are going to be common on old hardware, the type that's being discarded) make great GPIOs.
If you want a cheap ARM-based devboard, I'd say go for one of the Chinese SoCs -
AllWinner make some pretty decent ones.