I've no personal experience, but had been looking through the various webpages of people trying to get Mint running fully.

I get the impression quality might not be the highest, from their support forum, but cheap enough that I'd take the risk to get one with the super-res screen running Mint.

Of course, I've blown all my spare pocket cash on the.. err, Pocket now, so it had better be good

I reckon they intended to do this all along, i.e. underspec it slightly knowing people will ask for more, and then give a "free upgrade". Keeps people happy. If they had started with these specs people would still have asked for more.

I agree, but also can't blame them.
It's a rather nice way to do it. People already backing would have settled for less and get a nice "surprise" while a lot of others (who am I kidding: me included) are more likely to join in. I would not have wanted it with 4GB of RAM, but this makes it a bit more interesting – a promotion from "toy" to "toy that could possibly get some work done".

You may well be right, though they've hit my wishlist already with the 8G RAM. I'd like a wired LAN port (or two) but I'm probably in a minority of one on that one. Lots of fun things they could add, with little to minimal effort, assuming the original design allowed for the possibility.

Often (usually) when I design hardware I include tracking and allowance for additional features I think might be useful but aren't on the customers wishlist. If it looks to be useful later, or if the customer requests it, I can populate the hardware and if it checks out, develop firmware to make use of it.

In this context, I'm thinking one might imagine there's already a footprint for a uSD card socket, but no suitable driver yet, but don't expect the thing to grow a second processor, or move all the sockets to the back etc.

Large guaranteed sales, and some up front funding, might mean better prices on standardised hardware, so upgrading RAM takes nothing off the bottom line. I can't think what else could be easily upgraded similarly though - larger eMMC maybe?

Less exciting sounding add-ons like a decent pouch case could be on the cards? Would avoid the usual spend on a series of 'not quite right' cases that follows most of my equipment purchases

Earlier today GPD released an updated keyboard layout, but I'm not sure I saw an original one, so I'm not sure what changed.

Anyone recommend a decent USB3 dual port lan card? The first thing I want running on this thing is Wireshark!

From the comments

"Officer, why am I locked up? I did nothing wrong!"
"Sorry, you're locked up because you're in prison, so you can't be released."