Not disagreeing at all, but amplifying... It seems silly to compare Atari and Commodore in this way. They were both playing in a very immature market that real

Not disagreeing at all, but amplifying... It seems silly to compare Atari and Commodore in this way. They were both playing in a very immature market that really had no idea what direction it was going in, so their strategies bear little resemblance to today's mature and saturated market. Speaking as someone who lived through the whole thing, there were clear technological benefits to both machines. For example, the C64 had the SID just, bringing vastly superior sound. On the Atari 800 side (which is what I owned), the expansion bus was not just easier to use, but also allowed the floppy drives to outperform those of the Commodore competition. And the design of the Atari BASIC language was superior. C64 did have some better hardware but as I recall you needed to do goofy things like POKE special values into odd memory addresses to use them. By contrast, I recall Atari's combination of COLOR and SETCOLOR commands, which at first seemed baffling but later the realization of how they worked together (and other similar sorts of things) did a lot to help me understand software systems.