Well before there were Twitterati, the Silicon Valley glitterati fell in love with the Mac as a concept: a computer designed from the ground up to be easy to use, present a single, consistent interface, and be an appliance with minimal cognitive engagement from the user. Like a Yoko Ono piece, the vision was the product -- even if the actual hardware was lacking and expensive. And in the Mac conceptual world of the time, generating interest in computers and programming was seen as an anti-feature. You shouldn't have to be interested in those things to leverage the full power of the Mac, and if large numbers of people were getting interested in those things, the wrong things were being optimized for. Programming is just a job, and computers are just a tool to enable you to do your real work. Such was the thinking of the day.
The Amiga was an entirely different class of machine, designed by and for engineers, and it was a bit rougher around the edges UI-wise but it did far more in terms of real, concrete advancements in the state of the art.
For early '90's, there was nothing rough around the edges of AmigaOS 3.1. It was a fast, elegant and highly extensible operating system via DataTypes and shared libraries.
AmigaOS was tremendously powerful, but Macintosh System (as it was called then) had much more UI polish and could be operated with one mouse button (this was important!). The official programmer's reference manual, Inside Macintosh, contained strict rules for how an application should look and behave. By contrast, on the Amiga, some great UI frameworks existed but they looked rougher and a lot of people seemed to roll their own UI and play by their own rules anyway. To me this was part of the Amiga charm, but it was inimical to the vision of computing Apple was selling.
I didn't realize just how weak the Mac APIs were for building actual applications until I tried writing one. You NEED a framework like PowerPlant in order to contend with the very primitive primitives Apple supplied. And even then, you don't get nice things like preemptive MT.
Applications on the Amiga all had different interfaces because intuition.library had infinite possibilities since it only implemented graphic primitives on top of graphics.library.
I'm an Apple guy now but I will never get used to a one button mouse - it's too retarded, especially when one comes from UNIX where three buttons are simply phenomenally super awesomely useful: I love the mark with the mouse and paste with the middle mouse button - it's the best. I cannot figure out why others haven't implemented that - it's so natural and intuitive - I love that I don't have to explicitly cut and paste - marking is enough.
The Amiga was an entirely different class of machine, designed by and for engineers, and it was a bit rougher around the edges UI-wise but it did far more in terms of real, concrete advancements in the state of the art.