Compatibility
from a technical perspective, x86 should have been dead in the water next to the elegance of the 68k architecture,
The 8086 architecture allowed for backwards compatibility in both hardware and software to its predecessor 8080 -- the system bus could use existing 8080-family chips and a subset of the register and addressing modes matched the 8080's internals making it easy(-ish) to rewrite existing 8080 software and get it to work on 8086 hardware.
The 68000 was certainly an elegant clean-sheet design but it had no support chips for a long time after the first CPUs came out. The system bus wasn't directly compatible with any of the 68xx support chips or the 8080-family chips so it required bodges and/or lots of TTL around it to make it work at all. Any software for the 68k platform needed to be rewritten from the ground up rather than 'simply' being refactored.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
