SID and Paula

[drHirudo]

So at the time Commodore would have considered including the SID in the Amiga a step backwards (but yes it would have been cool by today's retrocomputing standards).

The Paula can do SID sounds by software. Adding it by hardware would have risen the price of the machine, without any real gain. Download the AHX and MusicLine tracker editors and run some songs. They sound like C64 SID songs, only better and more clear.
Even Octamed have synth samples editor.

[drHirudo]

Yeah, that was kind of my point.  The Paula could replicate in sampled/digitized form anything the SID could play (although some would argue it truely sounds like a SID).

The Paula can also almost perfectly replicate the sound of Yamaha AY-3-8910 (Found in Oric Atmos, Atari ST, Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128 KB), POKEY found in the 8-bit Ataris, Philips SAA 1099 (Found in the SAM Coupe) and Ricoh 2A03 (Found in Nintendo NES).

While having all these chips on the Amiga would have been uber-cool for retrospective overview, it would have made the Amiga twice as expensive, without any real audio capabilities gain.