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http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33409311 Looks like it’s purely a slave device—you can’t run any kind of development environment on it, like you can with a Raspberry π. Or indeed, the original BBC Micro that this is supposed to be an improvement on.

Yes, and that's the point of it. The raspberry pi is a nice platform, but it's really not a great way to teach programming devices. This gives you, on a single small board, capable of being powered by batteries: an LED array, buttons, accelerometer, magnetometer, bluetooth, and some GPIOs. You can plug one in and start writing programs that do meaningful, interactive things, basically immediately. You don't need to wire up external modules, do impedance matching, find a way to display what you're doing, do battle with IDEs, etc. If you get more complicated you have a few GPIOs, and at the point you've reached the limitations of this device, you're primed to start using a more complicated system like a normal arduino or a raspberry pi. This is getting pitched as a Raspberry Pi competitor by some websites I see, and I'm not really sure why they think it has to compete. The Pi is simply a different proposition. Giving every year 7 kid in the UK a Pi would ultimately fail, because with a Pi you need a good power source, keyboard, (mouse?), *a monitor*, plus whatever other bits you need to actually get the various IO and sensor options you want. The Micro Bit needs a USB connection to whatever computer they already have access to, and if they want to keep it running while detached, some AA batteries.