When they start making affordable arm or risc motherboards that can take pcie cards and ram sticks, then I'll be interested. The "pi" motherboard form factor has its place but we need better stuff.
Targeting developers is, I dunno, misses the audience. It would have been a great netbook, or a Raspberry Pi replacement.
If I develop something for Risc-V arch, it is probably some embedded thing with 100 MHz CPU and 2 Mb RAM, and I am cross-compiling it anyway on my more powerful PC.
So if I'm developing a garage door opener using ESP32 RISC-V module, I'm not a RISC-V developer? The dev tools and the cross-compiler only come in x86_64 variant, they simply won't work on RISC-V laptop. But at least they provide a Linux installer.
The only use case I can think of is to build Debian packages on a target architecture without cross-compilation, because many packages do not support cross-compilation, but it's more an issue of poor build scripts.
RIEC-V is as far as I know very new as a processor.
This means most of your software that works on Linux, Windows, Mac, Android or anything similar doesn't do so on the new processor.
This means you need developer who will port it or write new software for it. While crosscompiling is possible it is usually easier to have real hardware to test on. Not even to write the software on that device. You still can write it on your x86-64 pc and then either compile it on the RISC-V pc or crosscompile and test it only on the RISC-V pc.
For people who want to do this,it is targeted I think.
IMO this device is more of a prototype for working out issues with risc-v in a framework chassis. Not really for doing practical work at this point. Could mean that framework expects a powerful risc-v chip in the next few years, and wants to lay the groundwork for that now.
