Microsoft is taking a loss on every PocketPC box sold for a reason. They aren't doing it because they want to loose money. They're doing it because their other businesses allow them to take a loss on PDA's long enough to gain a stranglehold on the PDA market. Then, they'll change pricing so as to start making a profit on each box sold - possibly a huge profit.
I very much wanted a linux PDA last time I went PDA shopping, but wound up going with a PalmOne Tungsten C, for exactly this reason.
As an added benefit, Palm boxes are most likely going to be running linux in the future, with a proprietary PalmOS layer overtop - kind of analogous to what MacOS X does with *BSD.
We can only hope that this layer will be X11 based, so that we can intermix Familiar apps with PalmOS apps.