Most people have never used a real workstation, OKO. I got my first Unix workstation in the late 1980s, a Sun 3/60, all 20MHz of 68020/68881 goodness. We had some discussions in the lab whether HP or Sun made the better box (we had an HP minicomputer that did our real-time data acquisition for the entire lab of 20 PhDs with their associated technicians), but the quality of each was outstanding. And it was quite a contrast to the garden-variety 8088-based PCs that most everyone else used. And it ran real Berkeley Unix, though I don't recall if it ran X or not. It had some sort of window manager that used graphics; I'd bet it was X.
The PCs caught on because they were cheap and fast in a straight line. Terrible kludges in many ways, but hey, they worked and were cheap. Did I mention they don't cost much?
It really irks me to hear people talking about their garden-variety computer as a workstation. Simply, they are not. These days there really is not an equivalent to the workstations of yore, though perhaps some of the 8-core server boards come close. Even those suffer from the limited architecture, BIOS, and Intel/AMD chips.
Yes, this is waaayyyy OT.
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