Backwards compatibility shouldn't be some 'amazing feat' - it should be the norm.
I should be able to fire up a BASIC script from 1970 and have it still run. It shouldn't require me hours of hunting retro-computing websites for the right simulators - it should just be part of the OS.
I don't care how - whether that be emulation, or maintaining direct compatibility.
A set of emulators for all ancient computing platforms only comes in at a few megabytes, so there really isn't an excuse not to include it.
Why you say? Two reasons: 1. maintaining backwards compatibility isn't hard - you just switch to emulation every time you want to 'get rid of cruft', and then what happens inside the emulated container can be frozen in time and requires no maintanance. 2. Every time one breaks a legacy bit of code, all the users of that code have to do some work to re-invent it. It would be like shredding Leonardo da vinci's work just because we have better painters now.
The industry norm has been to leave things behind. And it worked really well for Apple, they make money hand over fist, and you see Macbooks being heavily used by even software developers. The market has spoken, it doesn't care too much about it. Microsoft being the exception is good reflection on them but they rarely credit for it, but get heavily criticized for every other small flaw, real or perceived.
You're kidding right? For one, Windows still enjoys a rather ridiculously huge lead on desktop computers. Who's second in that market? Well it was Mac not that long ago, with Linux in a distant third, though maybe that's changed now.
Mac actually took great pains to be backwards compatible until relatively recently. PPC's could run 68k programs, OSX could run tradition MacOS programs, and x86 macs could even run PPC programs.
And Linux Desktop can't run programs not in its repo unless you want to compile it from source.
So what does that tell us? Well, there at least appears to be a pretty strong correlation between compatibility and success with desktop OSs.
Eh no one wants to maintain and check all that old stuff or support people who bought something 10 years ago. If it works then great, if not then keep an old system around with that setup that supports it and make contingency plans when it inevitably fails.
Who cares what the people using the computer want, right? Fuck them. Developers don't like maintenance so everything needs to be burnt to the ground every 3 years so they can have fun reinventing the wheel again (usually worse than the last time). That's what personal computing is all about, after all, developers!
