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For the gadget to use a full-blown Operating system, you do not have to bog it down with a Windows 7 or the latest MacOSX.
There are many alternatives.
There is, for example, QNX operating system. I had a demo FLOPPY with QNX 3.0 operating system on it. You could boot 486 computer with a few megabytes of RAM from a FLOPPY and have a complete Unix-like operating system with windowing graphical user interface and even web brower. And it was screaming fast. It was used for realtime applications for years. It is still being used in critical systems.
Today, even a 'lousy' Arm 9 processor is magnitude faster than 486. The A4 processor from Apple even has powerful graphical chip on board.
Most of the modern mainstream operating systems are huge and hopelessly bloated, because they have to run on very, very wide range of hardware. Linux runs on everything from Arm based handhelds, gigital watches and toasters to supercomputers with great variety of hardware in between.
If you tailor-fit an operating system to a tailor-made hardware, if you tweak a few critical parts of the system in assembly language, you can get screaming fast system. It does not have to be a CLOSED system. Just release an SDK and make sure that installing a new software requires user approval and that the installed software is run in its own sandbox.
Just remember Amiga, remember Atari ST. Even the lousiest appliance today has magnitude faster processor.
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