Macs had the advantage of starting out with a blank slate several years later than DOS PCs, an eternity in the era when computer technology was growing and maturing at an explosive rate. Without being encumbered by the need for backward compatibility, they could take full advantage of all the available technology, designed from the ground up as a graphical system. They were also a closed platform, Apple designed and built the hardware and operating system together, allowing software to be developed to utilize the full potential of the hardware, rather than catering to the lowest common denominator. I'm sure some of you fellow PC guys remember screwing around with special drivers that would allow a specific program to use a fancy graphics accelerator, or buying a particular sound card that was supported by the games you wanted to play. DOS applications talked directly to the hardware without an abstraction layer so they had to be tailored specifically to use that particular hardware in order to take advantage of it.
Unfortunately the closed nature was (and is) a double edged sword. The high prices and lack of choices limited adoption while a huge selection of arguably inferior but cheap and versatile PCs flooded the market. Apple also ignored gaming for too long, insisting that the Macintosh was not a toy. My friends and I all had PCs back in the day because all the best games ran on DOS. If Mac versions were released at all, they came late and were much harder to find.
Looking back though I'm often impressed. A vintage Mac is far and away cleaner, more polished, more usable, and more modern feeling than a PC of the same era. It wasn't until the mid to late 90s that the Wintel world really started to catch up.