Also, Arduino is cool even when you know what's happening below the abstraction.
You get a very cheap fully-integrated fully-tested small-form-factor board with SMD components factory-soldered in, a flashed bootloader and great support (I got an Arduino Due with a fried DAC replaced). All that with an easy-to-use IDE with some cool libraries, where you can still use the low level stuff if you need to. It's also better for a much faster prototyping before you develop your final product.
So it's the best for beginners (as you said, it lowers the barrier of entry for EE) and also useful for electronics-savvy people. Is that bad? I don't think so.
And in Arduino's case, it's open hardware/source if you want to do it yourself!
Same goes for Raspberry Pi, which I don't even know if I could do myself (are Broadcom SoC's datasheets even publicly available without an NDA?)
> are Broadcom SoC's datasheets even publicly available without an NDA?
The SoC the RasPi uses, at least, has its datasheets available on Rasperry Pi's website. However, if you want to run anything but Linux on it, good luck dealing with its arcane boot sequence.
Those are only a tiny part of what Broadcom actually has in terms of documentation for the SoC.
Look at the full set of documentation for a modern ARM SoC that does have it available (e.g. TI's Sitara series - which still doesn't have the GPU docs included) and you'll see that it is several thousand pages long.
You get a very cheap fully-integrated fully-tested small-form-factor board with SMD components factory-soldered in, a flashed bootloader and great support (I got an Arduino Due with a fried DAC replaced). All that with an easy-to-use IDE with some cool libraries, where you can still use the low level stuff if you need to. It's also better for a much faster prototyping before you develop your final product.
So it's the best for beginners (as you said, it lowers the barrier of entry for EE) and also useful for electronics-savvy people. Is that bad? I don't think so.
And in Arduino's case, it's open hardware/source if you want to do it yourself!
Same goes for Raspberry Pi, which I don't even know if I could do myself (are Broadcom SoC's datasheets even publicly available without an NDA?)