the question is what one needs os4 for, especially under uae, except as a gimmick. afair there is no native software for it worth mention, that wouldnt be a port from the host or comparable platform.
Well, none of us 'need' OS4 - there's better supported alternatives out there for those that need to run modern applications (I make my living using modo, LightWave, DaVinci Resolve etc.)
But OS4 fills a nice, nostalgic niche for those of us the love the Amiga and out of all the NG platforms, OS4 feels the most like 'home' to me. I'm running it under emulation on my i7 PC purely for the fun of it and would seriously consider using it on a laptop dedicated to email/browsing/games (using in under Linux Mint on my i3 laptop atm).
There's such a huge schism between the platforms AOS is available for now though that how do you develop for that? Many applications/games will run great in 128MB of RAM - I know, I've tried tons of them - but there's also a number that won't.
I'd like to see a middle-ground that's ubiquitous enough that it can be used as a modern baseline and the A-Eon products aren't that - Tabor has (had?) the potential to be but until AmigaOS debuts on it (and we see what the final cost is) we just won't know (my opinion is that developing PPC hardware that offers a comparable price/performance ratio to commodity PCs running WinUAE is and will always be unachievable).
UAE on the other hand would make an excellent baseline if it was better supported by Hyperion and the Amiga community in bringing it up to spec (RAM, faster FPU, hardware 2D/3D) - and the cost of entry is peanuts for an OS 4.1 license if you've already got a reasonably-specced PC. It could be the perfect development platform and entry point for those interested in AmigaOS (really, it already is).
and beyond that we already know that so called os4.1fe "classic" sales (mostly for uae, since working ppc accels are rather few out there) already exceeded the sales for real os4 hardware, probably by magnitudes. and what are the notable results? besides, we also know, that when approached by vampire/apollo team for licenses hyperion demanded rather unrealistic conditions, and refused any development support. so if it doesnt indicate anything, i dont know what does, however you are free to draw your own conclusions, of course.
The real litmus test will be what happens after the Cyrus and Tabor ports are done - even if Hyperion wanted to support emulation (and I see their distribution of the Classic ISO via Cloanto to be a sign of interest) they're too busy with that right now. Perhaps you're right - we'll see.
Anyway - I said my bit - I don't want to derail this thread any more than I already have.