The closest comparable consumer products with equivalent engineering
requirements that comes to my mind is the just-released iPhone and
notebook/tablet computers.

Hell, forget Iphone, pick any mobile phone released in the last 5
years, they're all running 120-400 mhz Arm Chips, which any decent
programmer worth their salt should be able to make sing.

I'm a mobile software engineer... And I can assure you that what you
guys are seeing is scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of what
these boards are capable of- hell, we give our mainline game
programmers three days to do the menus of their games, and the stuff
they come up with wipes the floor with what I've seen from most
handheld avionics. To me it just smacks of pure lack of will, they
take the basic, designed-in-one-hour engineering interface and pass it
off as a consumer product because they know they can.