Ahhh, but lets not forget that there was a complete rethink to MacOS in the 1990's (exact date of switch from OS 9 to 10 as a whole evades me currently). Now MacOS X is really just a pretty face on top of good old FreeBSD! I always liked the stability of the *nix boxes I worked with.
I am currently going to be re-acquiring my Mac Mini (PPC) back very soon and I am more than happy to be using AmigaOS (soon to be 3.9) and MacOS X 10.4.6 for my day to day operations.
The whole Amiga experience for me is to be able to play some games that I liked when I had DOS 6.22 running. The Miggie just actually runs them better.
Although it is my dream to see Amiga make a comeback as a modern OS, it would (as MacOS X did) loose some of the charm that makes it what it is. While MacOS X is by far superior to any previous MacOS, it is not the same. I think that if Amiga does make a comeback, it will need to make the hard decision to be "modern" as well. That means you'll have two camps: classic Amiga and the new AmigaOS. (This is compared to those who run classic MacOS (9.1 or earlier) and those who run MacOS X.
Having been the president of my local Macintosh User Group, I can say that there are indeed fierce supporters of pre-MacOS X operating systems. The applications that they can not live without did not make it into OS X. I think we would definitely see the same thing here.
But I agree that we should enjoy retro computing and actually should make sure that as my generation moves forward, that "the kids" know what was so that they may appreciate what is. This is my whole motivation for the projects I am working on involving Amigas.
plus, the whole idea of "Remember when computing was fun?" is why we still use our machines.
My final thought for this posting is: What makes a computer usable is subjective. It depends on what the owner of the machine wants to accomplish and his or her needs. If the Amiga fills the needs of the owner, why not use it as your primary machine. If it can not fulfill your needs, then consider another platform. I like Macintosh very much, but it will not (without an emulator anyhow) do what my Amiga can do for me, Hence the Amiga fulfills my need for playing my retro games and probably could fulfill most of my other needs for Word Processing, etc... but what it does not do (to my satisfaction) is handle my music (there is no match to iTunes anywhere IMHO!). SO I will always need my Macintosh as well.
Point condensed: If your computer works for you the way you need it to, then why stop using it?
