Raspberry Pi 500+ boasts a high-quality mechanical keyboard with removable keycaps and individually addressable RGB LEDs, an internal M.2 socket pre-fitted with a 256GB Raspberry Pi SSD, and 16GB of RAM.
Ultimate?? And this certainly shows what they were up to when they left the M2 slot out of the original Pi 500. I'm sure it helps.
I have a 400 and it's a cool machine but its web browser is unusably slow. This new thing will be better but is will still be slow compared to a basic x86 board.
Interesting about the mechanical keyboard and I wonder if maintenance is possible. With the 400, there is no way to replace the keyboard when it wears out.
The lack of a pointing device is a big error imho. You end up needing a mouse or other thing needing a surface to put it on. Not so good for using on your lap.
Even with my 400, I generally used an external USB trackpad keyboard. So I think this 500+ ($200) has to be compared with a Pi 5 ($132 with 16GB and already overpriced) plus a keyboard and M2 drive. A Pi 5 with 2GB is $50 and a 16gb ddr4 sodimm (which won't fit in a pi) is about $40, so there is a gap somewhere.