All you need is someone working full-time writing drivers for all the new cards that come out.
When you compare PC prices you might also be comparing to discounted prices.
The SAM price is okay... if the CPU speed was double what you get. 1066mhz instead of 533mhz for the entry model.
It is seriously time to go ARM for a long term upgrade path. That might also avoid having a lot of the x86 expansion kludge that you have put up with.
People keep saying this but there is no desktop ARM hardware to port the OS to. Just tablets, phones and small RPi style machines with no CPU power comparable to even the lowest specced MorphOS/OS4 machine.
Then there is the problem of hardware documentation. It doesn't exist for most of the above devices so how are the devs supposed to port to undocumented and usually locked down hardware? By the time they could reverse engineer the hardware and stabilize a port worth releasing said hardware will already be several generations behind and out of production.
AMD64 is the only sensible architecture, much as I like ARM personally.