When you're writing in 6502 assembler, the weird layout actually turns out to be easier to program against then the Commodore approach where they arranged the lines consecutively. It turns out that doing a multiply by 40 operation is a bit tricky in that context. I am pretty sure that I could still write 6502 assembly to do 40-column graphics access on the Apple ][ if I had to. The 80-column mode stuff I'm less confident about since I don't remember if the memory banking was left-half/right-half or odd/even.