I came into a bit of money in college and decided to buy a Sun workstation.
You are correct - they didn’t know how to fulfill individual sales. The box was delivered to a LTL freight crossdock, and I got a call from a dispatcher to come pick the thing up. I had to drive to the industrial part of town. A bemused guy helped me get the carton down and remove the boxes, then I got to lug thing across the yard.
It was a fun thing to have amongst my nerd friends. I ended up selling it at a nice profit because I was willing to ship it anywhere. The monitor i sold at a loss to a graduate student.
So it's competition was the higher end of the Mac line and a bit up from that, really. Turned out there was never much of a market for personal workstations, hence the low sales numbers.