Not strange at all. Raspberry Pi is vastly more popular than any other competitor, perhaps even all competitors combined. It doesn't really matter that it's slower or that it uses an old instruction set.
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won't affect the performance for checking emails or messages. for task such as browsing and streaming over mobile, v7 is much more optimized.
There are nearly 4 million Pi's sold now vs. a few hundred thousand BeagleBone Black boards (which use ARMv7). If you only have limited resources to get your OS running on one embedded hobbyist board, I think the choice to use the Pi makes sense.
My point is that it doesn't matter that it's slow. What's more important is it gives them access to the huge Raspberry Pi community.