Original Arduinos were easy to get going and flash, but you would eventually hit the limits of the 'giant loop' system.
What made ESP32s attractive was that they supported Wifi/BT, a metric-ton of programmable IO, and the same ArduinoCore model (and IDE and ecosystem). Plus, you could switch over to the FreeRTOS event-based model (in the same IDE) and get a nice boost. If you needed even more juice, you could just switch over to the plain FreeRTOS toolchain and go nuts.
Those needing true multiprocessing could jump up to the RPi and head over to linux. Or for realtime, over to VxWorks, Zephyr, ThreadX, or QNX. From there, there is Android/AOSP. A nice on-ramp and a progression.
Regular Arduino hardware has always been stuck in Arduino-land. Not much of an upgrade path. This new platform is trying to create a pathway to linux, but they're going to come up against the massive RPi and Raspbian/Ubuntu/Arch ecosystem.
I just don't get why Qualcomm has decided to get into this. This is low-end, piddly stuff, and little to do with their high-end SoCs. Waiting to hear more about their roadmap.