Depends on your software stack, too: the Athlon system I bought in 2000 had no trouble running a web browser with multiple windows while simultaneously compiling, transcoding DV, having email & IM open, etc. on BeOS.
We've gained in many areas but I think it took the hail-mary SSD migration to dodge the usability hit from poor I/O scheduling on Windows, OS X, Linux, etc. This is far from saying BeOS was perfect (e.g. networking was wretched, there was no pervasive color management or visual quality from the switch to GPU compositing) but rather that some of our memories are colored more by the software than underlying hardware.
We've gained in many areas but I think it took the hail-mary SSD migration to dodge the usability hit from poor I/O scheduling on Windows, OS X, Linux, etc. This is far from saying BeOS was perfect (e.g. networking was wretched, there was no pervasive color management or visual quality from the switch to GPU compositing) but rather that some of our memories are colored more by the software than underlying hardware.