Its (effectively) a RaspberryPi and an Arduino on a custom board, with Wifi, 4Gig SD storage, and 50 RGB Leds – with a bunch of software (based on top of ARCH Linux). At the current intro price – my RaspberryPi based imitation cost more in parts that the Holiday @ $129 (even though I'm using WS2801 driven leds and don't need the outboard Arduino, a 'Pi + SD Card + power supply + USB WiFi + 50 WS2801 LEDs cost me over $150 - the LEDs alone cost me $90 from Adafruit (a while back now)).
(I said "effectvely", 'cause it's actually an iMX233, not the Broadcom SoC on the 'Pi - it doesn't have onboard video or ethernet, but it does have a USB wifi adapter inside.)
(Full disclosure, I've doing a bit of web-service architecture and devops for them…)
The problem is that the bulbs and the controller each have their own clock. You need to get Linux (a multi-tasking OS on a low-end chip) to write to the GPIO pins at the proper millisecond intervals. (Have a look at the underlying library; there are some values in there that are "well, these seem to work... adjust the timing if your chip's faster/slower.")
It works on the Arduino because it doesn't have a multi-tasking OS running underneath it to preempt the task. If you could get a realtime OS running on the Pi though, you might have better luck.
Good luck with the rest of this project. I did something similar at one point; I was using a RS-485 link between the Arduino and the controller. (Check SparkFun; they have some relatively cheap breakout boards for RS-485. I used one basic RJ-45 to bare pins for the Arduino end, and a RS-485 to USB adapter for the other.
There _are_ RTOSes for the Raspberry Pi, but they may introduce their own problems. I don't mind having an Arduino or something smaller in there to handle the light stuff. Even if you want more control than the circular buffer implementation, it's incredibly simple to write a serial protocol to just individually address the bulbs.
If you wanted to minify it, you could have an ATMega on a PCB with just the necessary components to use as a 'shield' of sorts for the Raspberry Pi.
http://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/raspberry-pi-leds/
Because the LED string I used has an SPI-like protocol to control them, it can be done directly from the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins without the need of an Arduino middle-man.
Right now, it's implemented in Node.js as well (using the node-spi library), but I'm also working on a Golang version that's completely standalone and just uses the SPI device in /dev.
