Also in terms of support by the creators, if they're serious about the 10 year commitment then I'd say actually that is better than Raspberry Pi. Mindshare in the maker community isn't that important to someone doing serious embedded hardware development for production as long as the company behind it is solid. Which kinda sucks, I wish there was more incentive for chipmakers like Broadcom to be more open but...
I have great appreciation for the work Maxime Ripard et al. have been doing on mainline support for the various Allwinner chips, hence why I kicked in a few bucks for their kickstarter on reverse-engineering the Allwinner VPU:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bootlin/allwinner-vpu-s...
But lets not kid ourselves, none of this was Allwinners doing and they could not give a fuck about mainline Linux.