Comment by userbinator

but my gut reaction is that no other competitor in this space would have sourced a damn 386-compatible CPU for such a product line in 2002.

These days ARM and Linux seems to be the go-to, but DOS and embedded x86 has a long history stemming from the glory days of the IBM PC architecture and the openness of its software ecosystem. You could easily write and test your application on a PC (perhaps with additional peripheral card(s) that would be integrated into the target) and then directly run the binary on the target device.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_%C3%89lan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9110_Communicator