What's so bad about Intel 8086 in technical terms?

[itix]

Fortunately, segmented/banked memory is long gone now.

Such techniques are still used in some operating system you know very well ;-)

Alas, on C64 you had to use memory banks to access all 64K RAM but for some reason 6502 and its descendants are not considered as "bad designs" like 8088/8086. Certainly 8088 was not too nice to program for but when I did some coding on 486 in Turbo Pascal it was not bad at all.

[itix]

What about little endian on x86? I have always found that really annoying.

Sometimes when you have to edit memory layout manually it is. Like ARGB pixmaps are actually BGRA pixmaps. :-)

But in normal coding you never stumble on endianess.

[itix]

Possibly because the "C64 was cool." Or maybe because the 6502 & decendants didn't go on to become the core of mainstream computers.

There was 16-bit variant which had two operation modes, emulation mode and native mode (like 80286 had real mode and protected mode) and yet another variant was used by Nintendo in SNES.

Yes I see you only mentioned mainstream computers ;-)

Yes, a compiler can take care of the bank switching for you. Plus, the 80486 also had a mode allowing full 32-bit RAM access without switching.

80386 had that already. 386 was actually quite decent chip unlike its predecessor, 80286.

But to me, as a developer, it does not matter if there is bank switching involved or if CPU is using slower base+index segment memory model. Only user experience is important.