Well, like most legends, it gets better and better with every re-telling. In fact, I think at this point it is expected. I've heard and read so many things over the years that I'm not sure what is factual and what is not.
From my understanding it was based around an 020/881, Carl wanted an MMU (851) for protected memory for a more modern Exec (he talks about this as one of the reasons he left), VRAM used for chip memory, and it supported a few high resolutions (1024 x 768?) and I thought a VGA mode without interlace. Again, it gets better with each retelling.
I too used to chat with Jay on his BBS (The Mission IIRC / he was Padre). He was awesome to chat with and extremely nice. Also met him at AmiExpo in Chicago and he was just as friendly and outgoing in person. A real class act.
-P
From what I've read over the years this sounds about right.
The OS team definitely wanted an MMU, but that would have introduced incompatibility with previous versions of the OS... I believe OS2.0 was supposed to be when that change over happened... but MMUs are expensive, so it never happened.
Jay spoke at great length about moving the chipset to have dedicated video RAM, the OCS strength was being about to do a lot with a relatively small amount of cheap dRAM. Video ram removes the huge bottleneck of generating the display from chipram... but video ram was expensive, so it never happened.
Commodore stuck to their tried and tested C64 strategy of just rehashing the same hardware over and over.
