Just curious: if the 68k series had had the same amount of resources put behind it as x86, there's no reason to think it wouldn't be similarly competitive today, is there? (Obviously this was historically impossible because nobody had the incentive that Intel/AMD have had, so I'm just asking from a technical standpoint.)
They expose the x86 instruction set externally for compatibility, but translate it to a different instruction set internally. It is conceivable that you could have instead translate 68k instructions and the rest of the CPU would have remained the same.
I think Motorola put their money behind PowerPC, a RISC architecture. I think it was a smart move on their part, because, while PPC didn't do so well on the desktop, it got into embedded products like video games and network hardware.
Today, the main CISC competitors to Intel are AMD and VIA, both who clone the Intel.
For a long time, the Motorola 68K family was ahead of Intel in every respect. What it didn't have was the whole PC industry depending on it and feeding it with endless financial resources.
