I agree with @sebresfan03, the TTL Serial is simply a MUST !
For GPIOs, there won't be much saving about removing header pins only (few cents), the GPIOs themselves are coming directly from H3.
IR is also only few cents, power switch also.
So, the only saving is the camera connector !
Here is a 2GB board, so it seems that such boards cannot be realistically priced at Orange Pi-PC levels.
"The board has an ARM Cortex-A53 64-bit CPU—which is used in smartphones, tablets, PCs and servers—and 2GB of DDR3 RAM. It has a Gigabit ethernet port, USB 2.0 ports, microSD slot and eMMC slot."--http://www.pcworld.com/article/3 ... rry-pi-2-rival.html
The 2GB version of the Pine64 will sell for $29, it's also a quad-core A53 64bit, 1GB version is $19. I have the 1GB coming in April. https://www.pine64.com/product
I think steven mentioned there will be a 64bit OPi sometime in the near future too.
Currently playing around with OPis, RPis and CHIPs.