The platform is very good out of the box, and only gets better because I can extend and enhance it easily - maybe not as easily as one or two clicks, but there is a lot of stuff not on my Macintosh powerbook because there is no way to get it to work (challenge - create a virtual serial port - something that Google Earth or other closed mapping program could recognize as a serial port for a GPS NMEA stream, but takes data from a TCP (or UDP) port. I have all the dev docs, yet I've not attempted it).
nc -l -p port </dev/ptyp0 >/dev/ptyp0