Welcome back..
What is the purpose of the A1?
It's (one of) the succesor of the classic Amiga line (A500 > A4000 type of machines). It's purpose is to keep the current Amiga users and to make the way for the future. Another alternative to the classic line is the PegasosII and MOS combination.
Is it in ANY way related to the classic Amiga?
Other then the name and the OS, no relation. Different CPU, no "custom" chip set.
Is it just a Power PC Linux box, or will it run Classic Amiga OS's? (3.1, 3.5, 3.9?) or is it just slated to run 4.0? (Or only a specific flavor of Linux? Will it run Red Hat etc?)
A linux is supplied with the A1, but its target OS is Amiga OS4. Classic software runs either thro UAE or on a emulation layer in the OS but the last one only supports software that doesn't hit the classic hardware directly.
What kind of hardware expansions are supported on it?
Not sure. Forget nVidia GFX cards with 3D support. Forget any special PCI cards as well. At the moment Amiga OS4 "only" supports Ati cards and Soundblaster compatible soubdcards (There are others but I can't remember them). Don't expect OS4 to support every PCI card like Windows does.
If it's just a fairly standard PPC board, why doesn't it run something faster than a 900mhz G4?
What standard PPC boards ? Only a few PPC board makers exist and they are either a direct competitor (Pegasos from Genesi) or don't give help to commercial OS efforts (Apple, Linux is ok for them, Amiga OS is not). AFAIK, other PPC boards are either in development or just don't exist. And offcourse there aren't enough resources to support a wide range of different PPC mobo's and chipsets.
