One thing the emulator probably doesn't adequately convey is just how painfully slow the Lisa was. We had a lab full of them in college, and I was very excited

One thing the emulator probably doesn't adequately convey is just how painfully slow the Lisa was. We had a lab full of them in college, and I was very excited to use the new GUI. But it was almost unusably slow, and I suspect that had more to do with its failure than the price. DOS applications, while ugly, were lightning fast by comparison.