I didn't have time to look through your links but I am finishing up a project for uni using a pandaboard and an xbox kinect that provides object detection and classification with path planning for an autonomous robot. I have tested my code on the beagle xm and it works fine but does push the cpu rather hard. I can't give any details on the atom but I find the pandaboard and beagleboard very versatile but I had a rather large learning curve with linux.