The endless debates we had Amiga vs Atari vs PC (Mac wasn't even considered). I remember vividly once we debated these three and Atari quickly fell out from the debate (numerous reasons why it was subpar to amiga). Eventually it boiled down to a friend debating PC (his) was better than Amiga and we all went over how 486 (up and coming at the time) was indeed better and with SVGA and stuff like that, but we were all team amiga. Said friend in the end convinced us PC is better (his). Somehow we thought his PC was, indeed, 486 with SVGA... it turned out it was a 286 with Hercules :) Amiga was so far beyond multimedia capabilities (especially AGA ones like 1200 and 4000) in anything in its price range that it surprises me to this day how it could've failed.
It was way beyond in multimedia capabilities at a point, but that edge was quickly eaten away by the raw power provided by the 486, and later the Pentium, combined with the modular PC architecture.
The Motorola 68k-family were beautiful processors to program, but unfortunately they didn't manage to scale compared to the x86. Commodore never made the jump to PowerPC.
The 1200 was a nice machine, but it was just a bit underpowered in every department. It had a 68020 rather than a 68030 (which meant no MMU), 8-bit sound rather than 16, no fast-mem (memory reserved for use by the CPU alone), and no chunky graphics mode (which had been rumored before its release).
The last point was a bit of a death knell for any kind of serious graphics performance. The planar bitmap model had worked ok on the older models with a maximum of 32 colors (5 bitplanes), but with 256 colors you had to do 8 writes to set a pixel. The bitplane model worked great for sidescrollers and similar games, and also for rudimentary 3D games with the help of the blitter co-processor, but when PC games started to do texture mapped 3D in VGA, the Amiga 1200 was left in the dust.
I couldn't get genlocked PAL signal out of PC until late 90's with Targa boards which cost as much as four A1200s in their prime. I can't even remember we used anything video related on PC until at least Pentium Pro became available (and WinNT). Amiga and SGIs were used in video production for an extremely long period of time (well extremely for technology time scale). That's why I was wondering.
For similar reasons (built-in MIDI interfacing) the Atari STs had a huge uptake in music production that has lasted well beyond their lifespan as general-purpose computers, and even into recent years. Music arrangements haven't gotten more complicated over time, so for many artists, there's just no need to replace setups using 30+ year old gear.
