Do you have sales figures on this claim? The only person I knew with a 1541 was a college professor; most Commodore owners in my area didn't start getting floppy drives until they got extremely cheap on the secondhand market. The Commodore tape format was miles better than its competitors, since it had parity operations.
I wouldn't say "miles better" as it was the slowest of all, despite the custom manufactured player/recorder (C2N Datasette). ZX Spectrum, for example, was able to save and load ~4 times faster using any cassette player with stock ROM routines.
