The Amiga was ahead of its time. Amiga people tended to migrate toward Linux, trading superiority of hardware for superiority of philosophy. I personally don't miss the proprietary days.
Consider the Mac is popular now when it's using the same hardware as PCs (Intel, NVidia/ATI) and runs on UNIX. Essentially Apple is based around a highly polished FreeBSD distro!
With some more resources, Ubuntu could do the same thing, selling tightly integrated machines where everything "just works".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1000
1985, Motorola 68000 @ 7.16 MHz, $1595
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II
1987, Motorola 68020, 16 MHz, $5500 (!!!)
To anyone who has ever used both, the superiority of the Amiga was absolutely unmistakable. But what are you going to do when apparently-sane journalists write things like this:
_...and now the iPhone, which goes on sale in America this month, Apple has prospered by keeping just ahead of the times_
Umm..? Ahead of the times? With a cellphone? I mean, they're about a decade too late to be consider "with the times" much less "ahead of the times". Oh, well.