I.... don't get it......

?????

I mean, I understand what's physically going on here, but... what???

I'm betting dead on arrival. Unless they have a good toolchain with decent specs to back it up, thus removing the point, there is no way you'll get any games beyond very primitive homebrew stuff, let alone commercial games. Developers don't develop in machine-specific assembly and bitbanging I/O registers of special-purpose processors anymore, it's done in C at the bare minimum, and more likely in high-level engines and frameworks, expecting somewhat modern capabilities.

Oh yeah, and we already have things like cartidges. They're called "SD cards" and "solid state disks." You can freely back up the contents.

"Originally, I just wanted it to be a 2D machine," Kennedy told Venturebeat. "But if we spend an extra five, ten, twelve dollars, can we beef it up enough to go to that next generation? We’re sort of playing that game with ourselves right now, where we want to draw the line for developers and what kind of games we want to see on this thing"

Looks like they're shooting for something a lil bit more modern, a sort of primitive 3D console perhaps, but if that's the case, you can pretty much kiss proper hardware sprites goodbye.

If they indeed take the step, however, hardcore assembly programming won't play much of a role given the speeds even cheap, old CPU's designed for embedded systems have been pushing for sometime now.

Personally, I have no use for it as the premise stands. They either recreate a proper system from the era that no one will care to program for commercially, or make it a low end PC that's not gonna be fast enough to run a port of whatever thing's being sold right now, for if an indie game developing company plans to get any of the invested money back, they can't settle for a single platform, it just isn't going to work.