Yes, it was cheaper.What do you like better about it?
But remember, it wasn't released until late 1986, less than 6 months before the Mac II arrived. I'd need some convincing that a 2.8MHz 65816, 16bit machine is better than a 16MHz 68020 + 68881 Mac II.
Of course it was 4 or 5 times cheaper!
It was also a colour machine and had decent sound capabilities, and with GSOS 6.0 (at least) appeared faster to me in real world application.
I used mine to write my honours thesis in 1987 (including statistic and graphing - which I wrote my own application to do), and continued with it in post graduate research.
Mine is now a hot rod with a transwarp card etc, etc - but i just don't get enough time to play with it these days.
It certainly would be interesting to see what would have happened if Apple could have used the lessons of today back then with respect to transitioning between platforms.
Apple have since moved from 68k to PPC, from NuBus to PCI, from serial and ADB to USB, from SCSI to Firewire and IDE and now from PPC to Intel with much less fuss than the move from 6502-like to 68K back then.
Regards,
Macdownunder.