I understand this opinion, but don't agree with it at all. There were two killer features of the 8086: First was that you could translate your 8080 and Z-80 C

I understand this opinion, but don't agree with it at all. There were two killer features of the 8086: First was that you could translate your 8080 and Z-80 CP/M programs to it without too much work. So for example, the IBM PC immediately had WordStar, Visicalc and DBase. I found an interesting example of the process here: https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon#yet-more-details https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon#yet-more-detai... (But this actually converts Z-80 to 32-bit x86.) Second killer feature is the hated segment registers. Yes, they are annoying, but they provide a rudimentary form of built-in memory management. So for example, you can run UNIX on x86, but you can not on 68000 which has no memory management. [Well you could with extra hardware: Trs-80 model 16 could run Xenix, but had an external memory manager. Also, you could use PC-relative code, but with a performance penalty- this is how OS-9 worked even on an 8-bit 6809].