If you are interested in the Pi also check out the BeagleBone. I love how easy everything with the Pi was. I'm hoping to do more home automation with either another Pi or a BeagleBone. As for now my Pi is controlling our detached garage, and has done a nice job surviving a Louisiana summer.
All of the Allwinner boards have mostly-closed Mali GPUs and closed but partially reverse-engineered CedarX VPUs.
Outside of Android the Mali GPUs are a bit of a bear to get working at all, much less use for anything useful.
For headless tasks I agree that Cubie/Hackberry are faster dollar-for-dollar than the Pi, but the Pi's VideoCore GPU, while still blob-encumbered, at least provides a documented interface with working drivers for both the "traditional" X11 stack and Android, as well as a real OpenMAX video decoding interface.
Shameless plug: http://itsbrent.net/2013/03/hacking-my-garage-with-a-raspber...