It's important to understand what this device is: it's not an Amiga. It's a console for running A500 - A1200 era games.
Even once support for running the Workbench is hacked together in a workable way, I don't see how that's a reasonable replacement for either a real Amiga or an emulated Amiga on a more open system. Still, it would be cool to just peruse the 1.3 WB and they really should have included DPaint as one of the "games".
I wasn't impressed by the quality of the included mouse and gamepad. So far they're not bad, but like I said, not impressed. It seems all USB mice work without trouble but third party joysticks are very hit and miss. However, I had no issue replacing the included gamepad with a Logitech F710 wireless gamepad.
If you already have a real or emulated Amiga setup that's to your liking for playing games, you don't need the A500 Mini. But it does have a role where it shines: as a game console you hook up to your TV. Sitting at a desk close to a monitor the low resolution of Amiga games often bothers me (Battle Chess especially!) but sitting on the couch that's much less of an issue.
An advantage of the A500 Mini over a real Amiga, and possibly over an emulated one, is that you can use a game controller and reprogram the buttons per-game.
It
seems it's possible to use a CD32 controller with an Amiga, but I'm not entirely sure. For the "Attack of the PETSCII Robots" game that I recently got, this has the benefit that it's possible to run in one direction and fire in another direction.
The A500 Mini will handle this out of the box by emulating a CD32 controller. It also lets you attach mouse or keyboard actions to the controller buttons. So this is nice for games where you mostly use a joystick but there's also a small number of keyboard keys that you'll want to have quick access to.
BTW, not sure if it's always been there, but there's
informartion about how to play each game on the RetroGames website. It even explains the rules of (battle) chess.
And an update to the WHDLoader install package that "fixes occasional black-screen display".
So I am warming up a bit to the device, but I agree no hype is necessary.