I have to agree with something Jettah said a few posts back, I think that the Amiga is more than the sum of its parts alone.
Like many folks, I started with the Amiga very early. I had owned many systems and also worked on larger systems professionally (PDP-8, PDP 11/23, VAX, Sun, SGI, etc), but none of them ever seemed to compare to the Amiga.
When people talk to me about the Amiga, they ask what it is that still drives me with the machine after all these years. I can't explain it to them. I don't know why tinkering with my StartupSequence is so much fun, I am not exactly sure what the attraction is to writing ARexx scripts for interprocess communications between my applications is. I don't exactly know why I get such satisfaction when I am goofing with C on the Amiga and I can make a new window that doesn't do anything. I am not sure why I think that it's important to mention to people that Datastorm is written in 100% assembly language. I am not sure why DPaint is still a great graphics application. I am happy that I know what blitter and copper means and that non-Amigans don't. It's unclear to me why, even though I think WinUAE is a wonderful emulator, I believe that nothing beats the experience of working on a real Amiga.
Maybe it's just that I don't want to be another regular guy, running Windows because it's what everyone else does or a Mac or Linux because it's the "next best thing".
Just my 2 cents,
Mike