I'm not clear about Intel's motivation for releasing this. Are they looking to capture a part of the hobbyist/education markets, or do they see this as being a product that will used by businesses (who I'm guessing are the majority of their customers) for serious embedded applications?
Note that I'm not saying at Arduinos can't be used for "serious" applications, only that my perception is that so far they haven't displaced existing microcontrollers in industrial/automotive/etc applications.
Arduino is a bunch of stuff around an Atmel microcontroller. For all intents and purposes, it is an existing microcontroller, except that the platform itself is outrageously expensive, far too expensive to be of any commercial use.
Note that I'm not saying at Arduinos can't be used for "serious" applications, only that my perception is that so far they haven't displaced existing microcontrollers in industrial/automotive/etc applications.