Where am I disagreeing with that? Hardware task switching already existed on the 16-bit 80286, and remained supported on newer generations until being finally removed in x86-64. Early versions of Linux did use it for a time, but doing it in software turns out to be faster, because the mechanism was badly designed for what a general-purpose kernel has to do.

Sorry, I see now that your comment could be read both ways, and my misinterpretation was actually a bit far-fetched.