I think it would have been nice if Commodore had licensed the chipset to some other manufacturers and Amiga clones had appeared. Commodore's designs weren't always perfect, their production capacity was not always up to task, and their hardware was not always cutting-edge. Plus, by the time the A3000 was out I think the engineers had realized that having a proprietary, non-upgradable chipset was only suitable for the low-cost systems like the A500 and A1200, and not the high end systems. (If you take an A3000 or A4000, and add a CPU card, GFX card, SCSI controller, etc. the motherboard begins to look like nothing but an overly-complicated backplane.) So why not surrender some control over the hardware and let other companies take a crack at it, while continuing to collect some license fees and develop the OS...
