While I did prefer the early80 through mid 90's in some ways I dont thinks things are as drastically different as people recall. The main differences now are that there are big businesses offering general computing devices (including "pcs") that arent soley aimed at enthusiasts. There's plenty of interesting computer stuff out there if a person is interested to look a little (much like we had to in the "old days"). Additionally hardware has gotten so cheap and powerful that there's few occasions, or indeed opportunites to come up with something that stands out, which makes "alternative" hardware often redundant.... why create hardware that's more expensive, soley to do stuff that can be done on existing, cheaper hardware, and better?
Evolution I believe plays a big part in why things can appear stale. Having said this though I think interesting things can still be done with existing/"generic" hardware. The last decade or so evolved things, now is probably a good time for someone to present things a little differently and/or think outside the box.
Even outside of that though there's plenty of good hobby computing around. There's parallels for pretty much everything that came before. There's good, hobby languages (blitz and dark basic are basically, err,... blitz, and AMOS Pro). More serious languages are still available, and often cheaper and more powerful than what came before. Free creativity software can be many times more powerful/functional than it used to be, fpga is becoming accessible to Joe Public, many homebrew consoles are available cheaply and so on and so forth. I think the problem is people as much as the computer industry itself.
