Is it really? If you want super low cost, they have the zero w2, the rpi2, the rpi3, etc. I feel they've already mostly perfected the products for that purpose. But of course they don't want to just 'stop building', so now they're moving up to more premium options. I feel there's nothing wrong with this. If you want the low cost exploration, stick with the things they designed forever ago, which fit that purpose.
The problem is that their high end options kind of suck from a performance/$ perspective. For $200, you can just get a $140 mini pc that will be 10x faster than a Pi and a keyboard to plug into it.
I don't think the lower end pi's are perfected (or anywhere near) either. The actual products are pretty good, but all the peripherals are pretty expensive and make the value a lot worse. A Rhasberry Pi zero only costs $15, but the case and SD cost $5 each, so the most basic config ends up costing way more than it should.
If they wanted to expand their offerings, IMO they should have focused on delivering sensible bundles (e.g. Pi+SD+case+power adapter) that aren't huge markups over the board alone (or maybe making variants custom tailored to specific use cases, e.g. a Pi-zero with emmc storage and insulated so that it doesn't need a case for long term use).
A $80 x86 mini PC is wildly more powerful than prior Pis - at least so far as my home assistant use-case goes (Pi 4). Of course, the Pi is still king of power consumption (where x86 has improved, somewhat) and form-factor.
- $200 PC: https://www.ebay.com/itm/266099800893 - Core i5 @ 3GHz
- $80 PC: https://www.ebay.com/itm/135697152406 - Core i3 @ 3.5GHz
So Pi is really filling a niche where you want form-factor, perf, and power consumption - but not necessarily price. This keyboard is firmly in that niche.
Those examples are for Refurbished, not New.
That $200 PC has $150 shipping and another $150 import duties