The scene is most certainly in a very strange place right now. This offering is based on an old, out-of-production CPU, and AmigaOS4 is basically being Ship of Theseus'd by the companies behind the A1222+ on account of its "developer" being more like a negligent IP landlord. Phrasing suggests they will not ship with AmigaOS4, but their (partial? incomplete?) replacement, System V54.
Why an old, out-of-production CPU? Well, this is their long delayed "budget" offering, intended to come in starting at around 500 British pounds. (For comparison, the last offerings came in STARTING at like 1700 and 1400.) The delays were due to AmigaOS4 not having a crucial feature required for compatibility with the CPU (no FPU) and its developer Hyperion being caught up in a legal battle with an even worse landlord. This sort of thing is actually also why the product made a lot of sense even just outside the price thing, because- and get this- the operating system doesn't actually support 64-bit processing (or multi-core processing, which it never will due to the memory management design intrinsic to Amiga), which was part of why the other computers were so expensive to begin with (tons of totally inert, unused, EXPENSIVE silicon!). After all the delays, maybe they decided their P1022 design was still best or cheapest over say a T1020, or they needed to get rid of the chips they bought or something- I actually have no earthly idea why they didn't just throw their hands up and go with a T2080 design, which would have an FPU but would not have been up to price spec. Regardless of the reasoning, it looks like a laptop using a T2080 is also being developed. The T2080 is not as powerful as the CPUs in the more expensive discontinued computers, but it will be available through 2035...
Oh yeah, that's the other thing! There's only two manufacturers of Power architecture chips, and one of them, NXP, has stopped designing new chips and will phase out production by 2035. The other is IBM. There's actually already a company (Raptor) that packages IBM chips for desktop, but their offerings start at over $5,600. Assuming they're still in business in 12 years, that'll be the only way anyone can get dedicated Power hardware, unless the Amiga companies do something similar.
But here's something interesting- FPGAs are technically capable of running a modern, if low-performance Power soft core. This could be another lifeline for the Amiga Power software community, though hardware vendors would still be out of luck as soft core designs are available free online for people to run so they'd have nothing to sell. There is one soft core vendor, though, Apollo, that is actually selling an upgraded, 64-bit 68k design on an FPGA package at 700 euros, which actually outperforms most Power solutions! (Not the new ones. You can think of 68k as the ancestor to Power, and what the original Amigas ran on.)
SO, to summarize:
- If you have $5k+ to drop, you too can have a liberated, transparent, powerful computer which can hypothetically run an Amiga-like OS if one were to be ported!
- If you don't have $5k+ but do have an FPGA or enough for one, you can run OpenPOWER Microwatt for a less powerful solution! Or wait for RISCV, idk.
- If you have 700 euros, you can get an FPGA-based 68080 computer!
- If you have a maybe slightly smaller quantity and really want an Amiga-branded Power computer that's weaker than ones that have been sold before but stronger than the Vampire V4 with support for more software, there's this I guess?
- If you wait another few years, you can probably get an Amiga-branded Power laptop, which may be the last piece of Amiga branded hardware, and certainly the last for the neighborhood of $1000 and not several multiples that. Get it while it's hot?
- MorphOS (the other Amiga-like OS) is working on migrating to other hardware platforms, but unless A-EON and the other companies act fast, the AmigaOS4/System V54 software library is probably stuck. More likely they will see no path forward for their business model and shrug their shoulders unless A-EON thinks it can become some kind of software package vendor like Cloanto is now.