> The original question was: "what a current Amiga would be in order to capture the qualitative jump the original offered when it was launched?".
Yes, but you drifted off that topic a little and I followed your tangent further. That's how conversations organically flow. ;)
> There were computers before the Amiga as well, but it represented a shift from computers as a business tool to a general purpose device.
Computers were already a general purpose devices when Amiga was released (I remember that well because I was doing exactly that with computers prior to Amiga). I don't disagree it was the best computer on the market though.
What the Amiga represented for me was a shift from a text orientated interface to graphical interface. Amiga wasn't alone either, you had Atari ST, Acorn Electron and the Apple Macintosh (though they weren't as big in Europe as the other 3). I never really considered Windows part of that shift because it wasn't really until the 90s when Windows started to add any significant value over DOS -- which was nearly a decade after their competition was released.
> What the iPhone did was introduce a whole new way of thinking about the phone -- as an entertainment device
I'm going to have to disagree with you there as well. I was using phones as entertainment devices long before the iPhones launch. The Sony Ericsson handsets I described were specifically sold as multimedia devices. The N-Gage was a hand held games console come mobile phone which capitalised on the success of gaming on phones and that was somewhere in the region of 5 years before the iPhone was released. I was playing even playing Tomb Raider 1 and 2 on my PDA long before iPhones release.
What Apple did with smart phones was make them "sexy". But that's purely marketing.
> I owned a PocketPC and a Palm Treo, but those were both productivity tools and the iPhone was something entirely different in the same way Amgiga was a shift away from the PC as a business tool.
Palm Treo and Blackberries definitely were business tools. But PocketPC was a lot more versatile. I used mine mostly for gaming and listening to music (I'm pretty sure I was running Winamp on that device). PocketPC definitely wasn't "sexy" though.
> Amgiga was a shift away from the PC as a business tool
I mean sure, if you ignore all the 70s and 80s 8 bit micros bought for kids playing games. In fact that was basically what kept Commodore afloat before they released the Amiga because their business-orientated machines (like the Plus/4) didn't sell well, unlike the C64.
Gaming on the Amstrad CPC 464 was so successful that Alan Sugar released a dedicated games console variant (it even supported cartridges).
Then you have the Sinclair machines like the Spectrum and ZX80. Clive Sinclair purposely built cheaper machines and went after the lower end of the market to attract family homes rather than businesses and because of that an generation of kids grew up playing games on them.
Acorn's BBC Micro was aimed at schools so is as much an educational machine as it is anything else. A great machine it was too. That and the Amstrad CPC 464 are probably my two favourite machines from the pre-ST/Amiga days.
> I don't see another plucky upstart shifting the hardware paradigm of computing.
Commodore wasn't a plucky upstart when they released the Amiga. They already had close on a decade of computers on the market. Some successful and others weren't. Not to mention the electronic hardware they sold prior to their 70s entry into micro computing with the PET.
In fact Commodore were older than most of the competition: Apple, Sinclair, Atari, Microsoft, Acorn, Amstrad (so many companies starting with the letter A!)
Though I will admit Commodore prior to the Amiga was reportedly a very different company (didn't the technical teams and some leadership effectively trade places with Atari? But I wasn't working for either company so I can only go by what I've read on that particularly point)
Going back to your point though, I do see the hardware paradigm shifting. I'd already mentioned augmented wearables. The next stage after that is augmented implants (though that is a long long way off). Smart phones are convenient but we're already seeing a shift away from them with smart watches. Google couldn't make Glass sexy but that's mostly a marketing problem and we do have a whole new generation who've grown up with Facebook et al and thus who many don't have the same privacy complaints that us grey beards do. So there is a culture shift there waiting to happen.