Raspberry Pi is certainly a very attractive device, and I am sure that I will order two or three of them. This is certainly an ideal platform for home automation, robotics and control purposes, and it may even be a basis for special-purpose servers and MP3 players.
However, the question remains: Is the device a good basis for teaching programming?
There is a very interesting review in this context at
http://www.i-programmer.info/professional-programmer/i-programmer/3419-raspberry-pi-or-programming.html.
To cite the author:
The point is that we don't really need more hardware to get kids interested in computers - we need the right software.This supports my idea I have for several days now (motivated by avra): To develop a special Linux distribution for Raspberry Pi with well integrated Lazarus / Free Pascal. I certainly don't have enough free time to do this, but I would like to suggest it to the community. I hope that somebody will have enough time and enthusiasm to do this.
Even if Harry Fairhead states that
modern programming languages have a steep learning curve because they are object-oriented we are in the lucky situation that, unlike some other languages, ObjectPascal has a mature object-oriented philosophy, however it isn't agressively object-oriented. Therefore it would be the ideal basis for implementing the original goal of the Raspberry Pi project, education in programing.