There are a hundred outfits out of Shenzen doing what they do, but Raspberry Pi's move a lot of units because they have backwards compatibility, good support and that has fostered a healthy ecosystem over the years. If even a single Chinese outfit got the memo, they'd be out of business quickly - but they don't.
I don't understand why customer support is so hard to get right for these Chinese companies. The pervasive mindset seems to be beating others on price is enough. For the maker market Pi's are aiming for, it really isn't.
Raspberry's moat largely comes to support and compatibility. They've fostered such an ecosystem around their SBCs that they're usually the safer choice if you want to build something with any expectation of long term stability.
Now that they're public, there's no guarantee that they'll maintain this commitment. They may feel pressure to sacrifice long term success for short term profitability. We'll have to see how this plays out.
Name recognition? You know exactly what you get, which isn't necessarily true for the bajilion clones out there. You know that if you buy an rPi, you can buy a replacement tomorrow and it will work the same. In a world where I can't even rebuy a laptop of the same make and model a few months later that's quite the advantage.
For the likes of us there isn’t really much of a moat but RPi puts a lot of effort into accessibility for beginners. Look at orangepi.org:
“We offer one-stop customized service based on open source products to shorten the path from technology to application”
vs raspberrypi.org:
“Empowering young people to use computing technologies to shape the world”
The underlying tech is very similar but the marketing and community aims are very different. If RPi can capture a solid chunk of the education market they’ll be able to dine out on that, and it doesn’t seem like OPi is equipped to do the same.
They certainly have an edge on ecosystem and software polish but it’s pretty slim.
I’ve got a mixed k8s cluster - half rasps half orange pi…and I’m having more issues on the rasp side.