What's so important about hardware crypto?
For me, the real game-changer would be some type of better GPGPU support on existing and future devices. Most of the FLOPs are in the GPU and it's not very practical to use it for compute due to lack of drivers and APIs.
Hardware crypto has an incredibly low gate count, and essentially all network communication requires crypto. Without it, you waste the (much more power and die-space intensive) CPU on AES.
There aren't a lot of flops at all in the RPi GPU, though. They probably want some sort of Neural Network inference engine, both because it is easy enough and makes for good educational content.
