Closer to the truth than one might think. The Pi can be tinkered with in the same way one could tinker with an Amiga or an Atari back in the days. You can, of course, tinker around in a Docker container or a VM as well, but they're not physical products and therefore not "real" in the same sense.
current gen skilled hobbyists grew up with fancying "physical" objects. a RPi is a physical object manipulating your data. a hosted VM(even if hosted on your own personal machine) doesn't have the same "tactility"
