As an amateur EE I am looking at Arduino as an entry-level solution for people who want to learn a bit about electronics and have fun getting some results.
Arduino is supposed to be simple and it is a feature, not a bug.
If they start making it more and more complicated, it will just stop being simple and it will stop being what makes it so usable to complete noobs.
There is no shortage of options if you somehow find that Arduino is not powerful enough to you.
Well that's sorta the point - they're making it more complicated here (same name, two completely different BOMs with different behavior). An improvement would be to make power management and low-power projects beginner-friendly (e.g. by expanding the API framework) and a compelling announcement would be showing that off. For me it's still a curious omission.
Nah, two different BOMs isn't making it more complicated. In the end you hold a board in your hand and have to figure out how to get from it to what you want.
Or think in a different way: A board you have in your hand does not suddenly become more complicated because the company comes up with another board with different BOM. Maybe choosing the board becomes a bit more complicated, maybe choosing any addons for the boards becomes a bit more complicated (as you have to navigate compatibility), but using the board -- I don't think so.
The Arduino framework currently offers only minimal abstraction over this. If you use Arduino on an esp32, you have to reach into ESP-IDF API to dial in the details, e.g. set up ext1 wakeup and disable the RTC memory explicitly if you don't need it. Betting this is the same here at launch.
Arduino here is introducing two versions of the same product with widely different BOMs and not addressing this matter at all.
I think it'd be a great enhancement of their productization effort if they started explaining power envelope, showing improvements over time, standardized an API (derived from actual use cases) etc. This would add value over the raw chips and datasheets for their audience of beginners looking for ease of use. Without it this is just throwing some random new breakout boards with the same layouts over the fence - a very crowded market - and banking on ecosystem effects without evolving the ecosystem and tackling new aspects.