who is supposed to be using raspberry pie? how many of you have actually played with one?
one of the problems with raspberry pi is that every little step takes long time. this was supposedly platform for kids to learn about computers. imho, it is way off the mark. kids don't have patience. performance is too low to even run included software, just try to browse folders. if you think that was fast, open browser and if you are still not convinced, try to send email using your webmail account like yahoo or gmail.
there are reports of PRI running quake 3, working as media centre etc. too bad that nobody posted image of their compilation to verify results. ones that are available are nowhere near advertised performance or what is shown on various videos.
the next thing is programming but to program one needs some software. yes there are python and gcc and nothing else. even VNC need to be added by user. there is no croscompiler toolchain (unless you want to spend etherneity setting one yourself) so either you have to live with then the lousy performance of interpreted language on a puny processor or you can write command line utilities. well you can also spend your life on downloading and recompiling zillion dependencies if you are really insisting on graphical front end. good luck with getting that first hello world program with gui that is not written in python. and if you find that there is Mono so one should be able to write DotNet apps in visual studio and run them on RPI, you heard good but nobody at raspberry foundation or anywhere else has bothered to prepare and offer for download image of distribution that includes Mono or Free Pascal and Lazarus etc. why? because the thing is slow! if you want performance, use different platform. for embeded get microcontroller or rather cortex processor and let the embeded do what embeded does (ST32 Discovery boards are $10-20 and not burdened with entire operating system).
finally comments go on this being used to interface your own hardware. well, the problem is that there are only handful of GPIO, one can do far more and faster with any microcontroller. those wanting to learn how to turn on LED or similar are far better off to pick microcontroller or development kit with training wheels such as Arduino.