But it does matter, that was the whole point. I got an A1000 coming from 6 months of ownership of an Atari ST (and 4 years ownership of a C64) and the Amiga was the first time it all gelled together IMO. And for this it does matter because the things that Amiga brought to the world of desktop home computing were only possible due to it's unique features.
Multimedia......only possible due to the OCS chipset. So what you take for granted today was born of a machine that could.....
Not as such. If you look at computing history of the day, it was being driven forward by a need for integrated media; the CD-ROM had been introduced earlier in '85, a technology C= only halfheartedly embraced (yes, yes, the CDTV and CD32, but how many actual C= desktop machines shipped with a CD-ROM drive? Zero, and saying "but the CDTV was a desktop amiga" is like saying a Roku Box is a desktop computer)
1. Play any sound in stereo, not a soundchip noise but ANY sound ever been digitally sampled.
Oh yeah; Amiga sound was pretty friggin' awesome when it hit.
2. Play realtime animation at 25/30FPS in colour, again this is only thanks to the architecture of the machine.
3. Almost photo-realistic digitized images, again only possible thanks to the ability to display 320 x 512 pixel images in HAM due to OCS.
Actually there were a few pieces of h/w that could manage this on other platforms; the IBM Professional Graphics System (required a dedicated monitor and was very pricy).
4. Ability to run many pieces of software together in a multi-tasking GUI. Again only possible because you could have a 4.5mb Amiga but only a 640kb PC or 1mb ST or Mac.
The Alto and Star (Xerox) were both managing to do this as well. With that said, the "640k only" thing is a myth. You can (and people did) have more memory than that on the PC. OS/2 and its GUI were already in development when the Amiga was released, so it's not like IBM and MS said "Oh crap copy that, we gotta do that too!" all of the sudden.
5. Arcade quality games in the true sense of the word (e.g. 1986 release of Marble Madness) compare that to the PC or Atari ST version of 1986.
Oh no doubt here; although I will say it comes down to coders - the Amiga conversion of Black Tiger, f'rex, looks like kak compared to the original arcade version.
6. Video production work friendly out of the box even with an A500 + Genlock + software. PC/Mac/ST couldn't do this because they weren't designed to do it.
Well...heh, saying "out of the box" and the pointing out you needed a genlock and software is a bit disingenuous, but the genlocks and software for the PC were orders of magnitudes more expensive.
(Also, was there anything the ST was designed to do well other than "be sold first"? Lousy audio (onboard, not the midi capabilities), lousy graphics, they never ever ever got a "big box" model together...pah)
BUT......there is no guarantee that any of this would have happened had Amiga not set the benchmark so high initially.
I think that's highly questionable. Loads of companies were already on the road with GUIs; media integration would have come along as an inevitability.
