As someone who keeps having the same thoughts and Amiga flashbacks, take my modernized wish list, in case you ever set out to actually do something like that:
Hardware: Smallish form factor, not with an integrated keyboard like the A500 but maybe a flat elongated box that can sit between the keyboard and the display (or wherever people want to put it). It needs to be absolutely silent, or at the very least silent at idle. It needs good audio and a decent, modern GPU. It should have easy user access to RAM, SSD, and other upgradeable parts if applicable. It doesn't absolutely have to be an Intel/AMD CPU, although that would not be the worst idea, but it can't be a low power ARM - it has to have reasonably good performance. USB 3, Wifi, Bluetooth are mandatory! User-controllable GPIO pins would be a huge bonus. So would multi monitor support, preferably up to 3.
Software: a minimal BSD or Linux base stack would be nice, and a sane and tight GUI on top of it. No mandatory cloud shenanigans. Come to think of it, sane and tight should be the overriding software theme. Ship compat libraries so it's easy to recompile existing software for it, especially web browsers and game engines. People who want to ship software for it shouldn't be made to jump through hoops (looking at you, Apple). Choose a single minimal but powerful GUI toolkit (or invent one), and build all the OS GUI with that, make that the default choice for your IDE. No insane plethora of background system services. Fast startup time, under 10 seconds minimum. No console-based tweaking should be required of the user for anything that is within the standard usage envelope, but all system management APIs should also be usable from a text shell if necessary.
My ideal would be that it can easily be turned into a single piece for portability - even if these pieces ultimately separated, like with a mouse/keyboard. I used to own an iMac (~2011) and loved that it just had one coord, although porting it around was awkward (I once took it on a flight!!).
I now use a single 4k TV in place of my former 4-monitor setup, so I wonder if the mutli-monitor trend is on the way out? Having discreet desktop spaces is a must though, and most OSes don't handle this well on a single monitor.
Anyhow, I agree with pretty much everything you say :)
Hardware: Smallish form factor, not with an integrated keyboard like the A500 but maybe a flat elongated box that can sit between the keyboard and the display (or wherever people want to put it). It needs to be absolutely silent, or at the very least silent at idle. It needs good audio and a decent, modern GPU. It should have easy user access to RAM, SSD, and other upgradeable parts if applicable. It doesn't absolutely have to be an Intel/AMD CPU, although that would not be the worst idea, but it can't be a low power ARM - it has to have reasonably good performance. USB 3, Wifi, Bluetooth are mandatory! User-controllable GPIO pins would be a huge bonus. So would multi monitor support, preferably up to 3.
Software: a minimal BSD or Linux base stack would be nice, and a sane and tight GUI on top of it. No mandatory cloud shenanigans. Come to think of it, sane and tight should be the overriding software theme. Ship compat libraries so it's easy to recompile existing software for it, especially web browsers and game engines. People who want to ship software for it shouldn't be made to jump through hoops (looking at you, Apple). Choose a single minimal but powerful GUI toolkit (or invent one), and build all the OS GUI with that, make that the default choice for your IDE. No insane plethora of background system services. Fast startup time, under 10 seconds minimum. No console-based tweaking should be required of the user for anything that is within the standard usage envelope, but all system management APIs should also be usable from a text shell if necessary.