32 bit painkillers...

The embedded market doesn't need another MBED, Maple, or Arduino Mega/DUE. These are great platforms, at reasonable prices, and as far as i can see, there is just no (horizontal) headache in the market that can be solved by the addition of another platform of this type / business model.

You might notice that the Arduino UNO was left off this list....that is because there is a fundamental difference to be found. There are -countless- projects / products out there that are based on the AT328/Arduino platform....so why don't we see the same width of dispersion (within the maker community) for ARM?

Things that are -not- the reason, in my opinion:

• No Suitable platforms: Yeah, right. 
• No approachable platforms: Mbed solves this, as does Maple, and Arduino is working on their DUE. 
• Not easily integratable: Mbed and clones are painless to integrate. 
• Chips too expensive: with bare chips at $1.50 - $10 per, ARM is cheaper than AVR. 

The problem is the time and money cost of prototyping and integration. Plain and simple.
This is a non issue for the AT328 - Arduino croud – DIP, <$5.

This cost comes from:

• Lack of expertise: The number of people who can design, fabricate, and assemble a circuit-board for a 0.4mm tqfp is much smaller than those who can design and build for DIP (stripboard, anyone?) 
• High unit cost... Even sending out to china, you are likely to spend close to $100 for a 2-3 boards. Then, unless you are proficient, you are going to take your chances or spend a large amount of time , or both, assembling the boards. 
• High Cost ($50+) of common easily integrated DIP based products that solve the above problems
• Still developing IDE solutions that are not too intimidating for the novice

The time and money cost of low volume integration is the painkiller opportunity for ARM / 32 bit (general) embedded development.

Even if breadboarding is falling out of favor for learning and experimentation, and it seems to be, a good baseboard (in the manner of the Arduino uno) solves this.

Breadboard/DIP/Strip/one sided/through hole/ easily made PCB's has value for to the amateur / small / educational / maker community for prototyping and small volume - proof of concepts. This is not likely to change

This explains my focus on low cost, DIP oriented solutions. I think that this is the way forward, at least until NXP/ST/TI/? Comes out with a PDIP28/40 ARM with respectable specs for <$10 (probably will never happen), realizing that this product will not really make money, but rather is advertising for adoption of their products.

I think that $10 is the magic number here. It may not be initially possible, but with scale it is. I can buy an 80x50mm board with an LPC1768 and a host of connectors for $15 in small production quantities. It should be possible to sell a chip that costs half as much, on a board 1/8th the size, with $2 less parts and connectors, for $10 and still make a couple of bucks. It will, of course, require an economy of scale.