so, being it that cheap, it'd be great if it also were an open hardware, such as the arduino.

I then found stuff like the beagleboard, which is open and all, but the 200$ seemed pricy, that's 1/3 of Mac Mini (yeap, I like using apple as a standard for expensive hardware as you have noticed).

The Beagleboard has a pretty powerful TI DSP chip that can crank through HD video - which is actually what the chip was designed to do.

Now, anyone felt compeled to try the Raspberry Pi with arduino? Glerm was telling me that arduino is now working on a newer version of the hardware that would take an ARM chip. So I imagine it'd be like having a built in Pi into the Aerduino, and that you could have an Operational System in it runing PD. Since Arduinos are so popular, and open and everything, I hope this would be very cheap and acessible, not to mention that anyone could by the parts and try to build it themselves for even less.

Arduino is a set of libraries and doesn't have to be tied to any platform. I use Arduino libs with a PIC32 at 80Mhz that is 10 times faster than an Arduino Uno. It's much easier to get something running compared to MPLAB. There is an ARM based 'Arduino' called the Maple that uses an ARM Coretx 3 (72Mhz) but the project doesn't appear that active.