My thoughts exactly. I image ts-7xxx buyers differ in the purpose they have for the board. I can imagine people who are mostly doing electronics stuff would prefer a simplified environment (see what they did with the Arduino and it's IDE on
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software) and there's another bunch of people, like myself, that mess around with linux and all sorts of packages on the board. Most stuff will simply go into the USB ports and perhaps some rs-232 directly to the ts-7400 pins but that's about it (for now).