If that line wasn't representative of the article's tone, they shouldn't have used it as a clearly-marked summary of the article. As for ZDnet as a whole, I've seen quite enough of their other output in recent years to feel comfortable making that generalization.
And the RPi hasn't been "the only game in town in this space" pretty much since the RPi came out, just the one with the lowest price; there've been an assload of cheap small ARM boards at similar price points to the Parallella, so I don't know why the journalist thinks that the Parallella is in any particular competition with the RPi specifically.
