For me at least, WYSIWYG word processing was the killer app on the original Mac. The 8-bit machines and current DOS machines at the time just couldn’t compare, although windows PCs caught up pretty quickly.

I remember it took years for Windows to catch on - not until Windows 3.0 I'd say, so really a 5+ year gap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0

There were other graphical desktops like Amiga and Atari ST around that time but nothing on either platforms had the finesse of the early Mac programs (as flawed as they could be).

They really didn't catch up until much later, and much of that had to do with printing. Macs produced decent output out of the box — fonts were a focus, and it showed.

I came in on Team Mac Plus and 1 megabyte was adequate.

My sense was the 128K Mac and 512 ("FatMac") were rather brief footnotes.

Still, college friend got a 128K Mac when they came out (Carnegie Mellon gave them to all the Freshmen?) and MacPaint + ImageWriter had us making our own cassette tape labels.