Well, this is something that happens pretty much often in a number of verticals. Just think about how cars, even the most sophisticated, look when compared to the prototypes exhibited by the their manufacturers years before at the car shows. Manufacturing is also about costs/margin tradeoffs.

That being said, having had the chance to tinker with those machines in the 1980s I can tell you that I owe them, and to my father, very much about my obsession for computer science.