I had the same thing. Sure it was bulky, heavy plastic at the time, but it never had the investment to evolve into something more efficient.

We didn't have to go down the road to soldering all the bits to a tiny motherboard, but Apple's vision of "small and light at all costs", including performance and battery life, killed all the other paths for the foreseeable future.

I might investigate EOMA68 stuff, though it is likely years before it'll be viable, if ever (especially given their anti-intel sentiment): http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture/EOMA-68