I've been reading this thread with great interest. Darksun raises a very good point, I think. If you look at the performance level possible with a modern Intel or AMD chip, the cpu time lost to emulating the 68k instructions is very small, I think.
Also, please consider this: the best solution to buggy old software crashing a nice new and fast Amiga system is to have a system that is nice enough that people will want to program for it _now_, correcting the problem by not only replacing those applications with new, but by releasing patches to old games and apps that have these sort of bugs.
It is not so hard to run a hardware-level debugger, say, oh, that guy ran out of coffee right here where there's this pointer arithmetic error, and just correct it by writing a small wrapper to the app that loads patches! I did this all the time on Macs - with resedit - and on winbloze boxes, too, and I can't imagine that amiga programmers from back in the day wrote code that is any harder to understand than that of other coders from that era.
People will flock to an os that can meet the challenge of not tormenting its users. Here is a good example of why:
http://picasaweb.google.com/patrick.killourhy/Winbloze/photo#5199703060705812642 This is not a fake image, it's a pic I took yesterday. Imagine if you were this gas station chain's mgmt and could order Amigas to replace the damned things to correct the loss of ad revenue (this sign is next to the I5 freeway and clearly visible from a _long_ way off) every time winbloze goes wonky! I really think people are at that point with these damned machines of ours.
I really wish luck to anyone trying to make an Amiga that can hold its own in performance these days, or even just be built out of available parts, and this is my small advice to them: dare to piss people off by 'breaking' some old functionality, because you'll never get it done otherwise.
Hopefully I can buy a new 'Amiga' someday, even if it is not 100% compatible with the old stuff - I say this simply because I am really frustrated, as a programmer, at how poorly designed operating systems are when compared to other types of software (relational databases come to mind here).
-p.
