To read up on the desktop machines that ARM really was originally built for, go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RiscPC
Those were really powerful machines for the time with an amazing OS that did anti-aliased fonts and had loadable kernel modules and stuff like ZIP files as folders (which we still don't really see).
The fact that Intel is #1 today on desktops is really one of those Betamax vs VHS things. Ie. it wasn't technology that did it. In fact in those days x86 was laughably bad. Intel has had to put serious work into engineering around the limitations of the x86 architecture.
+1 mate very interesting read.