What was amazing was all of what BeOS could accomplish on almost exactly the same hardware Apple was shipping. Pretty extraordinary accomplishment at the time. There are some technologies in NeXT which are invaluable today e.g. the native PS/PDF support and UNIX underpinnings but I think BeOS would've delivered far more bang for the buck in the short to medium term. I agree it's great to look back and wonder what if.

One technology that always gets forgotten in this saga was WebObjects. Had Apple actually released it for free it could've been the standard for all web applications built during that time. Absolutely nothing came remotely close to it. Instead it went on to inspire technologies like Hibernate and JSP/JSF which dominated early web applications.