This also true for other areas of embedded computing.It certainly offers a costs reduction and a lot less work on the hardware.

But the biggest impact would be on the software side. By offering a standard platform with alot of performance to spare at low cost, Embedded software could be written in higher level languages(lua/lua-jit seems interesting), use much more standard libraries, and higher level libraries.

So we might see a creativity boom in embedded devices, just as we saw when scripting languages started being used for web development.