1. If I need a microcontroller (e.g. low power or lots of interfacing with other hardware), it's the ESP32 if the board I get can handle it. Saving a few bucks to go with something cheaper doesn't make sense, and I can have a small stockpile so I don't have to delay a new idea to wait for Aliexpress. Haven't tried bitbanging, which is non-trivial due to the complexity of the chip, but apparently (https://esp32.com/viewtopic.php?t=713) it's doable.
2. If I want to run Linux on it, it's a Raspberry Pi. The supply chain issues this year really messed with it, but I'm a huge fan of using something that's as standard as possible, instead of figuring out the quirks of a new platform each time and trying to find which accessories are compatible with what.
3. Regular computer. Probably in a VM or a cloud at that point.
Also buyer beware - their new Pi Pico series is a microcontroller with no MMU and not something that runs Linux like the Pi Zero.
Sure it's 32-bit and 300+ MHz but I don't think it runs SCB-level OSs like Linux. Didn't see any mention of an MMU.
But I woukd divide boards that I use into : mostly microcontrollers. Those are fine with a low clock if they have lots of hardware io (spi, uarts, pwm, i2c etc), or if they require bit banging they need a fast clock (rp2040).
Then there are Sbcs like raspberry PiS, pine64 quartz 64 and this board. I use them for stuff that requires lots of processing power. Camera encode and send, emulate an old 8-bit computer, do object detection on camera feed, emulate a disk drive for a retro machine and so on.
So good specs matter to me. Especially this 6Teraflops NPU. I've been using Google Edge TPU that has (supposedly) 4 Tops and it works great for medium resolution (720p) object detection. Of course I woukd prefer 40 tops and ability to plug nvme storage to run large AI let's say on a small drone, but even 6tops is very cool.
It is a bit disappointing it has dvp camera interface only. Csi cameras are much more plentiful these days. Also no mention of camera isp latency makes me think it will be unusable for real time use (I would love to have "<20ms" or approximately one frame of latency).