You could do a lot with an '030 and 2 meg chip and 2 meg fast back in those days.
I added an '030 plus fpu and 16 meg fast ram (i hardly ever used more than about 6 MB in total, but it was so cheap at $200..) plus a 1.7 GB hard drive and CDROM in an external side tower, around about 1995. It opened so many options that made computing a joy, especially the aminet cd's and mag cd's.
I started off wanting to play cheaply-attainable games, but ended doing so much more. I did animation, video-titling, 3D rendering, Image processing with ImageFX in Ham8 split screen, grey-scale video capture with Prograb.
Most PC users I knew did a bit of browsing, email, Word, and played chunky games. And their mags were full of crap game demo's.
So who has the more "powerful" computer?
I really believed this could've kept many Amiga users from jumping ship until PPC arrived. But having to buy an '030 for $600, plus ram plus a cdrom plus $1400 for basic A1200 plus $700 for a microvitec or $500 for an NEC 3D monitor was insane.