I dunno what everyone else is using pis for but for me it's not media centers or servers. The pi has a full gpio header with i2c and spi. I can hook up LCD screens, sensors, servos, etc without much additional components. It's like an Arduino except I get a real file system, network stack, multicore performance.
It's more than just a single board computer it feels like an ultra microcontroller.
I feel like this whole "micro PCs are better than raspis" is coming from the group of people who never really used pis for what they were intended? I don't know. Maybe I'm out to lunch here, I'm not trying to defend the pi because it is definitely a really bad choice for a lot of things but honestly despite all the bad blood they've accrued there still isn't an sbc that can really match it's utility and community support at least that I've seen.