I was excited about it as you were about os/2 apparently. And even as good as it's compatibility was it still didn't take off until winxp (3 versions later). So I think all the os/2 conspiracies need to be taken with a grain of salt when the slow NT adoption shows that os/2's biggest problem was probably corporate inertia.
However, as the article mentioned, OS/2 did have huge corporate adoption, especially in finance and insurance. (Largely because IBM bundled it to their mainframe customers.) Most of these places switched to Windows when new OS/2 software dried up around 1996, but it wasn't uncommon to see an OS/2 terminal on a bankers desk well into the 2000s. (And I'm sure some places are still running it in a VM for some old internal software.)
Where IBM didn't have a clue is when they tried to market OS/2 to consumers and smaller businesses. Yes, you could go into the store and buy a boxed copy. But if you wanted to connect your computers to a network, you had to call an IBM enterprise sales rep. Assuming they even returned your call, and you figured out which alphabet soup packages to order, it was about $200/machine for the same basic filesharing which was included in Windows.
On the other hand, this helped Novell continue the DR-DOS lawsuit against MS. OS/2 1.x had little drivers initially, but it was beginning to improve by 1991, and OS/2 2.0 could use OS/2 1.x drivers.
Sidestepping chronology that is dating us massive, the productivity win of having minicomputer/workstation OS features available for microcomputers in both OS/2 and WinNT I just cannot overstate. Teh suck of rebooting a DOS machine multiple times a day just to do work is a memory best long forgotten.