Well, considering that the only type of project that dies before fruition here moreso than Programming Language projects are "Make our own Calculator" projects, perhaps a different approach towards this project could make it so that it actually gets off the ground. Less polls and more agreements (debates for parts are good, but holding polls for a long time makes people lose interest, forget the long timeline and urgent deadlines that should be kept, etc. -- how about people just research 3 alternatives for possible parts in each field, and we go with the one that is in the middle for both price and coolness)
In that case, the Beagleboard-xM looks great, and has a viable community behind it. However, pushing it as being the main backbone for the project is not something that should be done without considering a few more options (though, if nothing else comes up to the plate looking as good, then I'll go with it personally)
And with the beagle board -- how expensive is it? What contract rules do we have to follow if we decided to make use them in open-community hardware/software products? What discounts do they give for prototyping teams? For production batches?