at risk of jumping the gun on @tehn, gonna answer some yes/nos that are piling up
not really, scripts are self-contained lua applications, and should clean up all resources and processes when they exit.
but they also have full access to the UI, filesystem, and lua modules, and can be as modular or multilayered as desired. there are a couple of ways of acheiving parallelism within a script - lua coroutines, and callbacks from our own high-resolution timer system. so you could implement something like a teletype environment (for example) in one script. [details later]
likewise:
no, at the moment there can only be one Engine in use at a time, but Engines are pretty arbitrary supercollider classes that have access to all the features of sclang. @jah has already prototyped an Engine that implements a small modular synthesis environment.
it would be straightforward to create an Engine that aggregates other Engines, but for reasons have not yet done so [details later]
no, it doesn’t use a lua-based scsynth client like Lua2SC or similar. instead there is a full-blown sclang instance with some classes providing an OSC interface to our scripting process.
so,
higher level.
there are a number of reasons we decided to go with vanilla sclang - can get into it later. (but i want to say kudos to developers of sonic pi, tidalcycles, and overtone - they are great projects that required a lot of work.)
yes, it is possible to adapt the platform to run another SC client (or Pd or an LV2 host, or what-have-you.)
anyways, much more info to come on the development environment and software architecture.
yes, they use standard linux interfaces (sysfs, cairo). so it should not be hard to roll your own control application or FFI glue.
yes. though of course it will limit the battery life; m128 at full brightness with all leds on, draws almost 1A at 5V. (note that this is maybe 4- 5x more than a typical use case.) norns lipo battery is 2250mAh at 5V. i’ll check the base norns draw next time i have the battery removed 
there could, and its something i want to investigate further; AFAIK there isn’t a USB class for that -“DisplayLink” and “Magic Control Technology” (“MCT”) are two proprietary chipsets that should be supportable - the former is the most widespread by a good margin.
