Good points, and it made me have a mini epiphany...
i think you analogously just described Sun Microsystems, where Unixes (BSD originally in their case, generalized to SVR4 (?) hybrid later) worked soooo well, that NT was built as a hybridization for the Microsoft user base and Apple reabsorbed the BSD-Mach-DisplayPostscript hybridization spinoff NeXT, while Linux simultaneously thrived.
i think you analogously just described Sun Microsystems, where Unixes (BSD originally in their case, generalized to SVR4 (?) hybrid later) worked soooo well, that NT was built as a hybridization for the Microsoft user base and Apple reabsorbed the BSD-Mach-DisplayPostscript hybridization spinoff NeXT, while Linux simultaneously thrived.