From a purely, scientific and mathematic point of view the 68XXX is a far better system than the Hardware Segmentation forced by the x86.
You are correct marketing won. The better design did not.
ARM will beat them all into the dirt.
Linear memory bigot? All I did was select the best designs for the customer’s requirements at the cheapest price.
Had the market not collapsed I’d have done most things in “Bit slice”. and got exactly what I wanted.
I noticed you did not post that the 68XXX died in 1994.
I was visiting IBM’s Entry Systems design team at Boca Raton in the early 80s. They wanted the PC engine to be the 68XXX. But couldn’t get the delivery amount they were forecasting (250,000 first year)from Motorola.
The Intel salesman had told them they could get that kind of delivery immediately. Thus when they went with the x86 (8088 32 bit computer with 8 bit external bus). The 8 bit bus was designed by Intel to match the costs of interfacing external memory and I/O devices.
That forecast turned in to millions of chips in later years.
Marketing includes availability, you know.
Disclaimer: I made a 30 year career out of assisting customers with x86 designs until I retired in 2004.