Olin alum here - in my graduating class (2013), a majority seemed to have experience "making things" when we entered Olin but there was also a large contingent that was super passionate about and actively pursuing non-engineering activities. I think the admissions teams looks more for passion/hustle/doers than "makers".
It seems like high powered devices are becoming almost as cheap as low power devices, almost purely as an artifact of the rise in mobile sales. So, to your point, the thought process of which microcontroller/microprocessor to pick lies almost solely in whether or not it's connected to wall power.
I'm hoping the server that stashes binary builds will be accessible to not just Tessel users but everyone who is running Node on a MIPS architecture (for example, wrtNodes).