I firmly believe the Pyra can be used as a mini workstation even with 4GiB of RAM (it depends on what one defines as workstation though, a lot here might think programming and the Pandora might be just fine). If I'm doing say audio work on it I'd be managing bus sends so as to not overload CPU/memory for example. But there's a lot of useful programs out there at the same time that aren't too demanding. Sample libraries benefit.
No HDMI was a limiting factor when I had the Pandora, however it was Two Months ™ old by the time I had sold off my CRT. No way was that big monster moving with me. Was it just a mirrored display? Can't recall.
Pandora developers gave a lot of love for optimizing that small screen layout, but it's unusable for my purposes.
Does the Pyra support HDMI as a separate monitor, or is it just a larger display size output?