At least half of raspberry pi projects would be more easily accomplished by one of the phones kicking around in your junk drawer. If the bootloaders and hardware were fully open, making a linux distro run on them would be trivial. This would save thousands of phones from the landfill by repurposeing them as alarm clocks, thermostats, webcams, smarthome ___, and so on. They even come with a built in touchscreen and battery, which ras-pis don't!

The only cost to the company is open sourcing some software and internal documentation at end of life. My fingers are crossed the EU might do this but I doubt they will.