Frankly, I have a hard time understanding the reason for the amount of negativity that flows in this community.
What are you expecting? That the entire world would stop using Windows the day that a new Amiga is anounced? That all of the sudden, there is a gigantic flow of software available for your AmigaOne or Pegasos?
I think that there are reasons to be happy today, and even more in the future. These are not the days of Escom's or Gateway's vapour promises anymore. The products are here. The community is here. The developers are here. Sure, it's all at a very small scale right now, but we have to start somewhere, don't we? Building a platform takes time.
This is a great time for alternative computing. We're not going to see major innovations from the main players during the next few years. Take Longhorn for instance: delayed until 2006 and we know that basically it will be little more than a cosmetic improvement over XP with a few security issues fixed. Linux? Maybe support for some more hardware and make it less hard to use. Hardware? Just some more Mhz and even bigger/noisier cooling. So, there is plenty of time now to evolve an alternative platform to a point that, feature-wise, will be very close to the main players.
So, to answer to initial question: There is a bright future for Alternative Computing. It's already starting. In my opinion you have 3 choices:
1. Just use Windows/Linux/Mac all the time and ignore the whole thing.
2. Sit on your arse all day posting at Amiga.org and ann.lu about how depressing the whole thing is, that Windows has so many things that we don't, that people that bought a Pegasos or A1 and are having real fun playing with it must be really stupid.
3. Support your favourite platform in whatever way you can and have fun in the process, knowing that you are part of this effort to create an alternative, fun, computing platform.
I clearly chose option 3.
