Image recognition ideas for playing cards?

But what about a plain image match? 4 suit images and 13 'pip' images? Cold a 72MHz processor go through 17 images for a match fast enough?

Short answer: no. The main limiting factor is probably memory, 20kB of RAM is definitely not enough to do image recognition, even if you'd admit to wait for the result for minutes.

Nothing fancy here, but this might end up in the NN (neural network) area, with a supervisor-trained network, which I've no trouble with programmatically.

I don't think that neuronal network is the best fit for this. Take a look at the OpenCV library, many of your problems are already solved there. And a feasible computer for this task (the Raspberry Pi was already mentioned but is just one possibility) would run that library.