By the time Roma shipped it had a 1.5 GHz quad core Chinese SoC with SiFive cores (JH7110), not the Alibaba THead TH1520 SoC which turned out at only 1.85 GHz anyway.
You can buy the same JH7110 SoC in a tablet with docking keyboard&trackpad cover (so pretty much a laptop) for $160 from Pine64 (PineTab-V).
I would imagine the target market for these is "people who want a RISC-V development machine" at which point the price to performance ratio doesn't need to be as good for it to still be useful for the potential customers.
That or they don't expect to sell a meaningful number and this one has been productised as a public proof of capability exercise rather than primarily for the sake of the product itself.
