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In the 'bigger chip' category... Coldfires are fun. (Strong)ARMs are popular. Embedded PowerPC is more prevalent than you'd think. MIPS makes a showing in various guises. 486s and Geodes are great fun for some.

And SuperH seems to go overlooked, though it did crop up in the Dreamcast. Here's one 'DIY' project that used it:

http://www.azpower.com/mylinux/
And the guy explained why he liked it:
http://www.azpower.com/mylinux/why_superh.html
He also shows how FPGAs can be used. What ever happened to that project!? I wanted one!

It does seem like GCC for SH has been a bit.. 'variable' or 'neglected' of late. But now that the 3.x branch has settled, I gather it's improving/seeing maintainership again.

The Kaii - http://kaii.info/ was supposed to have been another SuperH design, but I haven't heard a peep about it, either. (They wanted to design SH boards in appropriate form-factors, port the OpenPDA platform of the Zaurus and friends to it, and license their designs to manufacturers cheap. I assume they were stymied by some of GCC's unsettledness.)

Meanwhile, if you want to start by 'reverse-engineering' an existing design, the "CommodoreOne" will be a well-documented design when it's finally released, also using FPGAs to good effect. Sadly, the project pages are perpetually down at the moment (unless someone knows where they've moved), but it's a simple uATX board, and will be produced/sold by Individual Computer - http://jschoenfeld.de/indexe.htm" - when they finally get things straightened out. Google may help if you care. There's another (unrelated) project out there for a similar but simpler design meant to resemble early arcade or home game systems' boards, but sadly, I can't remember the name of it.

Certainly a business professional is going to want something more like a Kaii?

It really depends how flexible the Simputer is, in terms of software. I gather it's a modern-tech cross between a high-school Apple II lab, an online library catalog, and the weird scattering of the special-interest 1-800# BBSes the US government used to run (and probably still does).

Of course, for students, families with kids, and so forth, owning your own might be an unfair advantage, but I get the feeling the markets are more different than you'd think. Anyone in India want to comment? Is there less platform chauvinism there than here, or am I right? ...and the most important question- what do they do to the villager who drops it and cracks/gouges the LCD? :)

If you'd read the article, nothing yet, beyond a single evaluation board- it's just been released.

SH3-DSP (IIRC) has found its way into the Kaii palmtop/universal-cheap-embedded-hardware platform from India that was just recently Slashdotted - (Main site here.)

Probably the coolest SuperH product since anything Sega's done, though I hear certain Japan-only Zaurii (using Sharp's proprietary OS, rather than Linux) run them, too... and all sorts of digital cameras, microwaves, maybe even some home routers and things...

The real important design differences are in software. Simputer FAQ. One of the big focuses of the Simputer was the IML information markup language, which is an XMLish application designed to be really convenient for multilingual applications, which in India means multiple alphabetic systems as well (so there's an input system), people with limited literacy, support smartcard media well, etc., and they've got some multilingual text-to-speech Kaii doesn't seem to have anything like that - their language support is English, with optional European , Arabic, and East Asian language support, and the possibility of developing something for Indian languages, and they're running a bunch of non-Indian-developed application suites. (There is Unicode support, at least.) The Simputer also has a built-in softmodem capability, which makes sense for something targeted toward the village computer market, while the Kaii lets you plug in standard cards, which could be modem, memory, ether, wireless, etc.

Look at this page, it says there what releases it's using.
HTH :-)

Problem is I didn't see a CF card slot (for wlan and extra storage) and the site itself being pretty much scary.

The hardware page says it has both an SD (flash) and CF2 slots. The site isn't that under construction.

Here's the text of the Linux on the Kaii PDA page:

Under Construction