IMO it would be awesome if it also exposed an ACM serial device so that one could connect with a terminal emulator and avoid fiddling with SSH.

Otherwise this is very cool.

The BeagleBoard was awesome at it's out of box experience. Connect it to a computer & a network interface shows up. ZeroConf advertises a webserver. The page is a web based IDE for programming the beagleboard.

USB gadget remains such a great fan favorite. Peripherals affording your main computer the option to do more is sweet, and that rpi & others can offer up their services as so is sweet.

Gadget mode can do more things than just network. I beleive you can set up your raspberry pi zero to work as USB mass storage microsd card reader. That seems kinda lame, until you realize you can also run transparent encryption on the raspi and unlock your SD card using passphrase entered via USB serial (also possible in gadget mode).

Raspberries don't do this by default? The BeagleBoards had this like 15 years ago, I assumed it's standard for all of these SOBs