@gregl
I have messed about with them too, but it seems for me they are not-ready-for-primetime, but with some hard-knocking effort you can get it to do some basic things. Smart guys will develop a great library and it will all come together, I am sure.
Spark Core is my new favorite. After sitting on the bench from last year's initial shipment, I finally got to play with it. It is amazing with its tremendous out of the box capabilities.
The Photon (which ships april) is only US$19, has 1 Mb of FLASH and 128 Kb of RAM, moving at 120Mhz... wow! Way overkill for a motion sensor, but it brings a lot of life to the world of Home Automation for a small price. ($10 for a surface mount version!!!)
I'm in the process of moving my Vera auxiliary controller project over to spark... I'll re-post the wireless version as soon as I can get it in a proper box.