You know, I've always been so impressed with the AmigaOS. When you look at other operating systems at the time (DOS, Mac, Atari) the Amiga is just so remarkable. Given the amount of money spent on the development of the Mac you would think the MacOS would be so much better, but it is far from it.
Apple had the honour of being the pioneer for this type of personal computer in developing it for a mass market. Pioneers must map the so far unknown territory and find solutions for the problems that arise as the product evolves. Apple spent an incredible amount of time and money on research and development before it produced the Macintosh in 1984.
This being a pioneering product, some of the decisions made in development led to operating system architecture design choices which were cemented for a decade, causing trouble along the way. For example, the original Macintosh had very little RAM (not more than a C64), and it leveraged the disk drive to compensate for that. The operating system design is strongly influenced by scarcity of RAM.
Anyway, the nice thing is that competitors can learn from what the pioneer did and travel along different roads. The Amiga certainly managed to do that, as Apple had, by mapping the unknown territory, done some of Amiga's R&D for them
As did other pioneers which came before them, most notably SAGE Computer Technology on whose machines the Amiga operating system was built before Amiga had a hardware platform of its own.
