I think as a beginner, you don't have enough information to evaluate an advanced product, no offense. The embedded market covers the a very wide range of customers. Many advanced products are better funded, have better documentation, because their market is a professional one that must produce good results quickly.
The IsoPod is applicable to all, but is not limited to, the following:
Rank beginner who is willing to sit down, learn forth, and program in an atypical paradigm compared to a lot of the embedded industry. A user who wants to have an OS, without paying the performance penalty. ( yes, forth is an OS in effect.) Someone who has a project that requires a LOT of hardware interfacing, but does not wish to tackle it with a PC. Someone who wants to use a lot of R/C servos. Someone who wants to read a lot of encoders or analog signals. Someone who wants to use FSM architecture to control behavior in order to avoid rats nest conditionals.
My experience includes programming in C, assy on the 6502 & PIC, C on the ARM, AVR, Python, and forth. I generally prefer forth and Python for work related stuff.
I worked for many years on a motion control crane using PCs but got it working really well using forth. It reads 5 quadrature encoders, does high resolution velocity calculations on 3 of them in addition, using additional timers, reads a serial stream, outputs a serial stream, and does a hell of a lot of calculus. This is a real time motion control system, so all maths must be done in a fixed period time. The IsoPod does this, and leaves processor time enough to allow the forground task for other functions.
Just because it tackles something of that massive complexity, doesn't mean it is a complex product however, just powerful.
Additionally, I have done the following: I have also wired up 6 mini pods on CANBUS to build a robotic centipede. Built a 6 leg, 3 axis per leg hexapod using one ServoPod that does complete inverse kinematics solutions per ler leg at 60 hz More 3 wheeled bots than I cane to remember with PlugaPods
When I came aboard my new job, Feb 2005, I was quite pleased to find many IsoPod related products in use by a majority of the embedded programmers there. I work at a think tank with many clients that demand good results quickly. We are able to do this with IsoPods because its language is fast, the hardware is powerful, and the programming paradigm is fast and efficient.
Mike