The RP1 chip has some parts of the RP2040, though details are a little scarce. There are apparently some things you can do on RP1 when the main SoC is powered off, which leads me to believe outside of the main IO, you could do some interesting things with GPIO and/or CSI/DSI ports while the Pi is powered down (or in some sort of sleep-like state).
How do you know in advance it will grow into a unicorn? I tend to agree with you, but that's a shame to have a team of 30 engineers working only on billing, even if you are a unicorn.. I would prefer to have them working on my product
[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.9/networking/af_xdp.html