It is good to see MIPS in the arena. The question is whether they can push makers to use MIPS not only ARM which is developing very rapidly thanks to the mobile market, including. I doubt that mobile vendors are ready to drop ARM.
CI20 is a nice board but its primarily for developers to get familiar with the platform. For examply WiFi works, but the chip antenna is mounted on the board next to metallic parts around so WiFi is very unsensitive. We measured its performance, it is a bit more powerful than BeagleBone Black, but behind the new quad core SBC's.
Next is the kernel. It is not yet matured which. All together it is in early development stage. Question, wheter there will be interest high enough to make Imagination to invest new SoC's and to find manufacturers use it.
I have a CI20 board. First tries failed due to kernel and boot issues, so porting TC is postponed a bit after RPi 2.
I whish them the best!