The Amiga was(and was designed as) a kick ass console, that Commodore decided to include a keyboard and mouse to, that ran cutting edge games for the time. The OS, although very cool, was secondary. When most people think of the Amiga they think of the cool games they played, and dabbling with cool creative graphical and musical software which often hardly touched the OS.
You also have to remember that most Amiga owners never saw a beefed up Amiga, seeing Amigas mostly as A500s, and only got as far as floppies, thus they may not have had that high an impression of the OS. We seem to have forgotten that as we've kept the faith all these years. It was mostly the incredible games and demos people remember that made computing exciting. Computing has not been exciting since. IMHO the appreciation for the OS came much later when the hardware didn't advance, and the PC took over, yet you could surprisingly still do cool stuff on the AmigaOS.
We will never have cutting edge games again as we will never have the cutting edge hardware ever again or for that matter, backing from major games companies. That is unless there is a special deal with Sony or something. I'm still excited though.
The mA1 hardware is adequate, but something like CELL on it will give it the potential to be what the Amiga was before. Kick Ass. A PPC Cell chip even on an mA1, would get the Amiga hardware into the ball park of its competitors, instead of woefully behind. The Cell chip, is a custom component, that reminds one of the Amiga Custom chips. Surely, with all the add-ons in the classic Amiga market someone could figure out a way to pop one on an A1. A stack of mA1s could become a rendering farmer's dream. With the PS3 coming out in 2006, we can't hope to have an A1 equipped with one, sooner than that. But then, I doubt OS4 will be ready by then anyway.
Amiga is very much about its community of braggarts. ;-)
We need something to brag about with religous zeal, and the A1 hardware as it stands now gives us nothing, except to say.... "see how good our OS is even though it runs on out of date hardware". Well, it's gotta be better than running Win95 on a P4.
What the Amiga isn't, is AROS or UAE. It's a combination of Amiga(Tm) hardware and Amiga(Tm) software that makes an Amiga. The Amiga is a computer in the same way a Macintosh is. If AmigaOS was an 'also ran' on PCs it would die immediately, probably through piracy. Ironically, Amiga was practically synonymous with piracy in it's heyday. We need to change that this time around and support the devs, because the Amiga is really just clinging on for dear life right now.
Ok. Going back to my happy place now. 
