The hardware served two purposes, as I see it: 1. It was obviously a "toy"/"educational tool" making it less desirable to divert from the intended use case.

The hardware served two purposes, as I see it: 1. It was obviously a "toy"/"educational tool" making it less desirable to divert from the intended use case. If you had a charity unload pallets of refurbished Thinkpads to the Global South, plenty of them won't end up in the classrooms. If you visit the local petty functionary and he has a bright green toylike machine on his desk, it's obviously been misallocated. 2. A standard reference platform provides a uniform target for third party devs. Think about developing for the C64, versus a contemporary PC which could have one of four or five different video cards and a dozen memory sizes.