Nothing wrong with either approach. But your comment makes out they're a for-profit company with closed-source hardware acting like the good guys.

Not sure it's fair to label them as just another company when they're not-for-profit and pump all their money into a) product development and b) education programmes.

To be honest, if the Pi was open source hardware, everyone would buy the clones (like they do with the Arduino ones) and the charity side would have much less funding.

As opposed to now, when people buy such totally-not-clones as the Banana Pi and Orange Pi? For that matter, Arduino seems to somehow have stayed profitable in spite of getting murdered from every angle by the clones.

The clones are fine for simple stuff. But they really cut every corner possible, so even the chip is counterfeit, which means it doesn't behave like a real Arduino does. Deep sleep will use 1000x as much current on some clones compared to a real Arduino, for example.

You really can't only use clones. You have to develop/test on real Arduino hardware, then deploy to clones. Because the clones aren't reliable in their behavior.