The price increase would be significant: the board is full, so unless we move to double-sided surface mount (which ups the price a lot) we simply couldn't fit it in - you may have noticed there's no back panel room either when you take into account some things like PSU capacitors which are up against the back panel.

USB is on-chip on the strongarm (although it's broken in the current SA silicon, so we have to use an off-chip USB - it's still several times cheaper than an ethernet transceiver plus pulse transformer plus RJ45 socket). Later versions will move to the on-chip USB.

DHCP doesn't help when users break their dial-up PPP setup with ethernet settings and come moaning to us :)

PCMCIA needs various things on both the PSU front, size, etc. Add to this the lack of USB slave cards (a USB host card is pointless as it can't connect to a PC without *another* box between the two).

100Mbit ethernet is out as there isn't the bus bandwidth (it's simple ISA basically, not PCI) - and almost *all* 100mbit chipsets are PCI-only (there may be one which isn't, but it's unlikely to be cheap).

Hugo