Anyone buying a Moto SX equivalent Mac would have known from the start what they were buying, a low price if limited Mac.
Is there
literally anyone who didn't? I can't imagine global coverage was these was any different than MacWorld's was here in the US and MacWorld was
extremely explicit about what you were getting every single time Apple did anything like this. Despite it, they liked the CII, IIvx/IIvi/P600, 630, and so on, because even though they were limited compared to higher end pro oriented systems, they represented reasonably good value for money. They included benchmarks each time and so if you were doing any research at all on your new computer, you were doing what you did with your eyes wide open.
I can sort of see it maybe happening in the P200/400/600 scenario, but even then computer magazines offered frequent showdowns and would have documented that issue, and, TBH, those models were basically all designed explicitly with "home users who probably aren't running Mathematica or Photoshop" in mind.
Unless what you mean is that all the 16-bit-bus Macs were well documented as being so. (They were.)
Apple was stuck with pure 32/32 bit equivalents of the 386DX. They were forced to lame computers on the Logic Board and in ROM.
To be honest, I don't know that I see this as a very important distinction. They stuck an '030 onto an '020 platform, which was literally exactly what the 386SX was for. That Apple did it in-house and Intel did it for the PC OEMs is mostly just a matter of the fact that Motorola didn't see the need to build that as a dedicated SKU. Apple would have bought them if they could.
The 386SX system I built specifically to run CorelDraw had 16MB of RAM and CoPro for that processor/numeric operations intensive app.
Idly, how much did that cost?
68020SX and 68030SX CPU availability would have precluded LEM's denigration of 32bit systems lamed in such a manner as RoadApples.
No it wouldn't have. (Almost, just to be safe) Nobody writing LEM ever bothered to know what was
actually in a system or consider why it was built the way it was.