Yeah the pros of having access to a common architecture cannot be understated. You'd think ARM would be widely supported by now given that nearly every phone runs it, but every time one tries to do something vaguely nonstandard you run into walls that simply aren't there on x64 (especially with an AMD/Nvidia/Intel GPU and common net card instead of <insert SoC manufacturer's barely supported custom homebrew card>). There's a reason one cannot simply update Android phones to the latest OS without explicit vendor support and the reason why is not pretty.
Goes doubly so for the Pi specifically, since they stayed on 32 bit armhf OSes for the longest time which have even less package support and just straight up cannot run a wide range of software. And the new arm64 builds are laughably bad, having an almost 10-50% performance overhead on certain processes. And the Pi 4 is already painfully slow even compared to cheap android phones.
It is in most aspects an absolutely terrible way to get started with computers.
Conversely, for anything embedded or with hardware control aspect to it that needs more than an arduino or needs a GUI, Pi is the common architecture that has widely available hardware interfaces, code and community support available.
Yeah, if you're using it for web development or something it will suck to just try and install all the dependencies you need. But if you're making a 3D printer with a web interface, touch screen and maybe a camera, or a robotics project, it is by far the easiest thing to get started with.
Originally Pi was created to promote CS learning and I get that it has some shortcomings there but it sure as hell has enabled a lot of people to learn about embedded computing and robotics.
That's definitely true and why the Pi is so popular at all, but if you don't need to explicitly interact with hardware there are generally better options.
Goes doubly so for the Pi specifically, since they stayed on 32 bit armhf OSes for the longest time which have even less package support and just straight up cannot run a wide range of software. And the new arm64 builds are laughably bad, having an almost 10-50% performance overhead on certain processes. And the Pi 4 is already painfully slow even compared to cheap android phones.
It is in most aspects an absolutely terrible way to get started with computers.