@ Gus: Arduino is much more than “a board with headers”. It’s an ecosystem. It’s a community. It’s a movement. It’s also (now) a lawsuit 
@ Duke: $0.025 per cable: http://www.ebay.com/itm/65Pcs-Male-to-Male-Solderless-Flexible-Breadboard-Jumper-Cable-Wires-For-Arduino/301266215602
As to price: cost is not the only consideration, nor is benefit. People do cost-benefit analyses before decisions, and in the aforementioned student’s case, Arduino came out on top.
To each his own, but there’s this side of me (the cynical side) that says, why would someone want to learn embedded development but not learn about any hardware or any low-level software? What’s the point? It seems to me that something like the RPi would be super-ideal, especially running Windows 10. What would an ARM microcontroller have over something like that? Full-fat framework running on full-fat Windows with full-fat filesystems and networking stacks, and the equivalent of a couple hundred dollars worth of Gadgeteer modules, all for $25.
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@ Sprigo, @ iamin - you picked wrong guy to pick on. I’m not saying Gadgeteer [em]has to be[/em] cheaper or cheap, I’m just saying that the price, IMO, was the main key factor that almost drove it to extinction.
Whatever I do to spread Gadgeteer spirit, I do it for free on my own time expense, just like Duke and Gary. Unfortunately, my colleagues from across the pond think the price for Gadgeteer is right. But that’s fine, we can have different opinions. If all the rumors about RPi+Windows10 become true, we will no longer have differrent opinions about it — even godefroi agrees the price will be right 
By the way, I totally agree with Duke Nukem, that the fight is over new makers, not old ones. And in this field, many of you guys underestimate of how young students value their time. More or less, it is usually ~$0 per hour. So the only entry costs they see is the price of the hardware.
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Tomorrow I have another Gadgeteer class and it is currently over booked as there are a bunch of High School Students wanting to attend (apparently the High School students last week were raving about how cool Gadgeteer was so now even more want to come), so Gadgeteer is gaining some really good traction here in Calgary (one of the large local school boards is also very interested and is sending teachers to see what its all about) as I’ll have to setup more even more classes (and the number of Gadgeteer Dudes locally is growing which is great). I was hoping to visit some other locations to try teaching this course so I could see what the interest levels are, but I might not be able to as I’m fully booked in Calgary (I did promise the Wife a trip to Edmonton so she could visit her Sister, and so I’ll be teaching Gadgeteer at the Microsoft Store there hopefully in May for a weekend and I’ll take the kits with me for my summer vacation and travels so I can do some classes in different locations as I really do enjoy seeing people get that ‘I can build cool stuff’ look on their faces). Thus far I’m hugely pleased with the results and interest and will try to keep the pedal to the metal for Gadgeteer and maybe we can get this as a regular class for all Microsoft Stores and even maybe a bit more
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