Not so! System 7 was by far the best of the Mac OSes and (while it's not very well-suited for power-user tasks) it has the nicest interface of any OS I've yet encountered. New MacOS is just BSD with a pretty skin on it.
Well I'd say UI wise System 7 had about the same merits as the current iPhone. By the time it was called 9 it had gathered some entropy and was less stable than OS X. While NeXTSTEP had a great GUI, they screwed most of the unique features of both MacOS and NeXTSTEP on the way or slowly degraded them into nonexistence. Today Mac OS is really friendly to Windows users and tolerable for Unix hackers, but isn't as homogenous, as it was before.
However in 1994 the Mac was very very expensive, the OS was slow and had no multitasking and no great games. I couldn't justify buying one any more than people can justify an X1000 today.
