The 6800s would have needed a ton of peripherals to get anywhere close to being a PC. We had dedicated applications, and I eventually got pretty good at building products around them. I think we only had a couple of products that even had RS-232 ports on them, and none of them had interface screens. We had one that did put out NTSC/PAL video, but that was more of a screen-filler (used when we weren't actually playing tape) than anything else.
I built up an 8088 PC that eventually had two floppy drives, two 32MB hard drives, a math coprocessor, a 2400 baud modem, a color monitor, and a RAM drive. I used a relational database manager called PC-FILE-R, and it would exercise the disc drives like crazy, so the RAM drive was a godsend.
And these days I edit video and author blu-rays on my PC at home, not to mention chatting on message boards. Ain't science amazing!