Re: Competitors dead in the water?
Well this has categorically answere
No it has not. Still 100 MBIt and no SATA. So it is still as useless as the previous one for microsdesktop (in a network), thin client duties or a NAS. If you want any of these you will still have to (grudgingly) shell out for an x86 based system :(
It is probably even worse than the B+ in terms of power budget too. B+ is barely useful (I got 3-4 in use for security apps) because it has under 200mA or thereabouts left after the SoC consumes its share. It really, really, really needs a proper power plug instead of still faffing around with micro-USB. Otherwise these 4 USBs are useless - you can realistically use only one or two.
The B+ was fine for classic Pi IO duties (sans the power issues) in a IO/Network application and that was about it. For that two cores, 512M and 100Mbit are enough.
If Pi will really insist on trying to do something in the "desktop" space it should try better than this and put a Gigabit Soc on the board.