What's the point, anymore? There are incredibly inexpensive Celeron-based SBCs on the market that vastly outperform the pi4 in any metric you can think of.
Unless there's a pi5 on the horizon with higher clock speeds, better memory bandwidth, better I/O, more bus lanes, etc, who the hell would want a pi anymore?
Beelink N5095 with 8GB RAM and a 256GB M.2 drive goes for $130 on Amazon. If you want just the board, the case is easy to strip off. The only reason not to do this is if you want GPIO pins, but USB->FTDI->Cheap Arduino board is an easy workaround to that.
For some people lack of GPIO, increased power usage with the need for active cooling, and a 40% price bump will be offset by the advantages of faster CPU, x86, and the storage. It feels more like something that will live adjacent to the Pi 4 rather than killing it, to be honest.
> If you want just the board, the case is easy to strip off.
On the contrary, I think I'd be worried running it without the case and cooling.
Unless there's a pi5 on the horizon with higher clock speeds, better memory bandwidth, better I/O, more bus lanes, etc, who the hell would want a pi anymore?