I read the two replies above and made a decision to go get one. Took it straight to a mate's house and plugged it in to his mixer and hooked a drum machine up to it via for something for him to play. (For some reason he comes with me when I purchase new gear, I think so he can sit-in on the first session and live vicariously through my synth habit).
We fired up the µfreak and started to scroll through the presets. First impressions were great. There is a good range of sound demonstrated within the first 64 factory patches which had Ric reaching for his SH-01 and JX-03 in an attempt to try to pull sounds out that matched them.
Running around the front panel in with the usual "I can work this out without RTFM" worked well too. Tweaking the presets to taste was easy and the display helped workout how to set some of the less obvious functions. Guessing what to do with the mod matrix was dead simple due to that. It was only until we decided to write our own sequences on it that we turned to the tutorials on YT. I had a good idea on how to program it and the video confirmed my ideas of how it worked, but for Ric's benefit I ran through the exercises (he's never seen any Arturia gear before let alone used any so I humoured him by playing dumb
).
Late in the night, after faking many a classic synth and pretending to be many a classic artist, we went onto programming a sound from scratch, which we thought would be simple, but actually showed-off the programming skills of the factory patch designers very well!
I finally left and returned home to get some dinner, after which I sat-down alone to integrate the freak into my (mid-relocation minimal) set-up. I plugged in the power, fed it to the mixer pulled up patch 129 and started to program. After crafting some sounds I have been trying to create on my Blofeld for some weeks now but have been pushed more towards playing with the presets due to the menu-based programming. The Freak's close-to knob-per-function interface combined with its onboard sequencer makes it very immediate.
Now back to the original
ruse question; is the MicroFreak a gimmick or game game changer? Looking around the hardware landscape lately there has been a move towards the hybrids, but few companies are doing them at the price-point the µFreak is at. Korg's minilogue XD is another stab at the versatile digital oscillator into analogue filters but it's also almost twice the price. Admittedly it's a polysynth, but as far as easy access to synths that encourage exploration and experimentation, there is nothing else on the market so easy to get into without parting with a week's pay check!
In that way the Freak* is apart of a clear change in the synth world. The move back to hardware was spearheaded with the analogue renaissance, which as nice as it was to get remakes and a few new creation, could only last for so long before the same thing that happened in the early 80's occurred again. The time has come for the digital renaissance, but this time the tech has come a long way compared to analogue. Discrete circuitry may be way cheaper now but MPU's are way beyond where they were when the DX-7 flipped the market on its head in 1983. It's wonderful that companies are combining the two and hopefully the MicroFreak it the tip of the iceberg and there is a full 5-voice poly hybrid in the works (well 10-voice is really what we need so to avoid voice stealing when playing big long release pads, hint hint!)
*
The Freak was a character in a 1980's Australian soap opera based in a women's prison. She was a corrupt prison warder known for her brutal treatment of the inmates. I can't help but think of Maggie Kirkpatrick when I shorten the synth's name to "the Freak" 
