That is true, but the 6800 came with a massive ecosystem, all available directly from Motorola! They had reams of useful documentation, including complete, test

That is true, but the 6800 came with a massive ecosystem, all available directly from Motorola! They had reams of useful documentation, including complete, tested implementation guides for things like POS terminals, early simple ECUs, smart disk subsystems, etc. You could build all of those things with chips bought directly from Motorola, engineered to be 100% compatible and easy to interface. For many small systems, you didn't need any non-Motorola parts other than passives. I guess the flip side was, Motorola had to create all that in-house, and the price of the ecosystem reflected that. MOS dumped cheap chips into the world at just the right time and got hobbyists to do the work for free, sometimes with superior results. Probably no one could've seen that coming in 1975.