Doesn't sound like the 'cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on' that the original Pi used to be. It is not as cheap and a power hungry beast, still small, though. More and more like a PC and less and less a small cheap embedded platform. For some people it is a plus (I guess for most people here), for some not so much.
I tend to build my projects on Raspberry Pi Pico now, but sometimes I would need something more powerful and Raspberry Pi 5 will be too much.
The project goal has never been a 'cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on'. The whole point of the project is to build a small cheap PC to give away to school children to increase computer literacy, while making it attractive enough for normal people to buy to fund the charity side
That display out will be hard to match with an old optiplex or laptop, but I agree, the pricing is getting less absurdly low and more just moderately low.
To be fair, I'm guessing the majority of Pi's are used headless anyway. Plus even the older Optiplexes have DVI, which is just HDMI without the audio or fancy stuff like ARC. Won't be getting 4K or anything, but still a very good video output and IMO adequate for almost all use cases.
I'm betting a decent amount of them are used as media PCs. The x265 decoding, 4kx60hz output, 2x speed ram and better wifi are much appreciated for that application.