Raspberry Pi interview: Eben Upton reveals all (Linux User)

> The OMAP ROM boots your code and you have full access to whole hardware.

Not really full access. Any hardware registers, which are only readable/writable in the secure state, are locked out and need some support in the ROM API for accessing them from the linux kernel. The comments from Russel King are quite interesting here:
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.linaro.announce.boo...

Beagleboard is an amazing project and a real breakthrough for its time. But even more freedom would be definitely nicer and I'm ready to move to a less restricted hardware any time without any regrets, assuming that it is also competitive in other aspects :)