Oh, I'm sure it's great for industrial, as long as you can live with the hardware security issues. In college, my first serious task as an intern was to take a Cortex-M0+ and make it pretend to be an 8051 MCU that was being obsoleted. Unsurprisingly, this was for an industrial automation firm.
I mimicked the 16-bit data bus using hand-written assembly to make sure the timings were as close as possible to the real chip. It was a pain in the ass. It would have been amazing to have a chip that was designed specifically to mimic peripherals like that.
It's great that there's a community growing around the RPi microcontrollers! That's a really good sign for the long-term health of the ecosystem they're trying to build.
What I'm looking for is a comprehensive library of PIO drivers that are maintained by RPi themselves. There would be a lot of benefits to that as a firmware developer: I would know the drivers have gone through some kind of QA. If I'm having issues, I could shoot a message to my vendor/RPi and they'll be able to provide support. If I find a bug, I could file that bug and know that someone is going to receive it and fix it.
PIO is a huge selling point for me and I'm thrilled to see them leaning into it with this new version.
It's already as you hoped. Folks are developing PIO drivers for various peripherals (i.e., CAN and WS2812, etc.)