Motorola offered a compatibility library to assist migration to PPC (essentially emulate 68k) to make the move more 'natural' which probably is why Apple chose that path. RISC was en vogue and most ppl wouldn't have bet for x86 to have a future at all. Endianess definitely was an issue that ruled out x86, too. Additionally Intel architecture was closely associated with ISA, singletasking and DOS and nobody really wanted that.
Those were the days when computers hadn't really arrived in mainstream yet and many medium-sized companies could afford developing CPUs. Then the internet hype began, manufacturing volumes and thus development budgets skyrocketed and most were lost on the way. It's an irony of of history that the architecture that seemed least fit sank all others. Today it's just an abstraction layer to an underlying - RISC architecture.
