Sure, in terms of hardware, it was a slightly better A500, and you could plug it into better monitors than the A1080, and you could finally get "normal" IDE HDD

Sure, in terms of hardware, it was a slightly better A500, and you could plug it into better monitors than the A1080, and you could finally get "normal" IDE HDDs which were a fraction of the cost of SCSI HDDs with some expensive third party adapter. But also, Kickstart/Workbench 2.0 was a million miles better than 1.3, and it opened access to a lot of very cool software. Even though the A1200 and A4000 got KS/WB 3.0, most new software remained compatible with 2.0, and only used 3.0's APIs for bonus functionality... the big leap was from 1.3 to 2.0 (of course, if you were purely game-brained, you'd probably be complaining that your A500+ or A600 didn't run KS1.3... bleh, you had enough RAM to softkick it if you wanted)