> Plug it into TV, turn it on and you're in basic and can start programming.
No reason why someone couldn't create a Pi installation which does that - RetroPie boots into the game console screen, after all. BasicPie could just as easily boot into a Basic / Lua / Pico8 interpreter.
(Get a normal Pi install with X and set Scratch to be the startup/only X app? Would that work?)
In Ubuntu you'd just use console 1-6 instead of console 7. Console 1 is typically a terminal, while console 7 is typically a GUI. You could configure getty to start a REPL as a shell instead of the normal login shell.
No reason why someone couldn't create a Pi installation which does that - RetroPie boots into the game console screen, after all. BasicPie could just as easily boot into a Basic / Lua / Pico8 interpreter.
(Get a normal Pi install with X and set Scratch to be the startup/only X app? Would that work?)