I think the criticism is that Arduino is "softwareized hardware". The way you build up an Arduino-system is by fitting pre-engineered modules together in a well-defined general purpose framework.
I'll venture a guess that the average Arduino project is several orders of magnitude more expensive and more complex than a purpose-build non-software electronics project. It's just that the complexity is hidden away in extremely well tested, well supported and well understood chips (such as the 8086 and the Atmel chips in Arduinos) and while $20 is orders of magnitude more than a few cents, it's still just $20.
Software people lament the unhackability of modern computers because they are highly integrated and requires a deep stack of drivers and operating systems to every turn on -- an Arduino board probably represents roughly the same loss of control to a hardware guy who knows how to do cool things with an oscillator and a couple of transistors.
I'll venture a guess that the average Arduino project is several orders of magnitude more expensive and more complex than a purpose-build non-software electronics project. It's just that the complexity is hidden away in extremely well tested, well supported and well understood chips (such as the 8086 and the Atmel chips in Arduinos) and while $20 is orders of magnitude more than a few cents, it's still just $20.
Software people lament the unhackability of modern computers because they are highly integrated and requires a deep stack of drivers and operating systems to every turn on -- an Arduino board probably represents roughly the same loss of control to a hardware guy who knows how to do cool things with an oscillator and a couple of transistors.