Will it? I'm not aware of any other than the HP workstation. Maybe one or two of the Chinese mini PC manufacturers. But nothing you can buy as a mini-ITX motherboard.

Of course you will. Asus et al have heard the buzz, have the connections, and can spin up a product far quicker than the 5-9 or months before Strix Halo is available.

Sure, to the extent that happens, the Framework will compete with them. Competition is great.

It's soldered RAM, which is a fantastic trade-off for specific scenarios (inference). If all you care about is local inference, this thing is basically the same price as a 5090 (I think?) with multiple times the memory, and no need to purchase "everything else" (mobo, CPU, etc.) alongside. And given that home inference will typically be serving a single user at once, a handful at worst, you really have no need for a GPU. I'm guessing that this product will be uniquely positioned for quite a long time.

For every other use-case? Yeah, just get a desktop.