What peculiar semantics

Well, "useful" to a kernel level hacker presumably does mean being able to work with it at the lowest level. I can even understand how frustrating it may be that there is something you *can't* see. But really, unfortunately, that's how modern hardware is - I have 627 firmware blobs on this machine from the distribution.

For the rest of the planet, and with RasPi in particular, it means "can I do something cool with it"?

And I also bet that this isn't the last thing RasPi people manage to get out of Broadcom. I assume getting even this far has taken a huge amount of work - this *is* Broadcom after all. Creating a hugely popular board on their hardware and showing them that they can too profit from the community is a win-win. Some people just want everything right now. We'll see. Glass half full!

Now if I could just get around to doing something *useful* with my two RasPis...