To bring the 286 up to the Amiga's functionality cost a fair bit. I know, because I had a VGA (er.. MCGA? What was that proto-VGA actually called?) 386 at the time, and a friend's 500 still wowed me. Think of the price of RAM back then, and the OSes available. Heck, remember what GUSes and SB16s went for originally? (This from someone who had to borrow a CD-ROM reader every reinstall of OS/2 until.. oh, 1999 or so.)
That said... beyond the other comparisons, I really think that Radeon is still competetive, *especially* against the S3-derived designs built into the Via chipsets you'll get going with a C3 solution. I could be wrong, though.
Obviously an Athlon64 cube is probably going to be loadable with whatever's peak at the moment, but that's not quite the low-power market, and with the economy turned enough that even a slacker like myself can find a job, the truly interested probably won't have too much trouble affording both. (So in other words, this could top out at roughly the appeal of the iMacs a lot of people got and then relegated to the closet... but there should be fewer excuses to relegate a functional, expandable, Linux-capable PowerPC board to the closet.
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