I've been following this for the better part of a year and know what's basically the whole story.
It starts with the GP2X, which is a good emulation device in it's own right. The community loved it, but the company that makes it? Well the community got frustrated with them for one reason or another. So, they pooled together various resources and started making their own console.
They didn't have a processor at first, but Texas Instruments, who were watching the Pandora project closely, made available to them the Cortex A8 ARM processor, which is a very badass processor. It can handle the OpenGL and other stuff that boggles my mind. It's also got fantastic battery life. Like 11 or 12 hours of use and I think I saw something like 52 days of listening to music with the screen and everything else turned off.
But it's a kickass emulation machine capable of 3D effects. Just look at the videos for it on Youtube.
I just don't know it it'll be a kind of device where there's a run of say 6000... and that's it. They said that there's gonna be one of 3000 for those that have already preordered and there'd be another, but I don't know. I hope I make it in time. I don't have $330 lying around at this point. I think they're accepting more preorders right now, but the forums are down where they give the link to do so.
Also, for those interested, this is basically the Pandora, Desktop Version:
http://beagleboard.org/