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UNIX could barely run in PCs at the time, and if X is slow now imagine it on a 386, so the high hopes must have come from interacting with illegal substances. Moreover, X was used to multitask xterms and only long bearded gurus were using UNIX at all and they needed no stinkin' GUI.
Then again, besides the privileged few, most people ran Windows to multitask DOS applications for most of the Win3.11 era. The only non-bundled windows application I recall using before getting Win95 is Microsoft Word for Windows.

I know, I know, I am full of merda bovis. Then how does your (I might add rich if you could run any of those on contemporary systems) fanboy brain explain this?

386BSD:

X for Linux:


Motif:


Compare that to:



or even better to Windows 95(By that time comfortable use of X in Linux is listed on 16MB):

Still have them on the shelf. Both of them. :-)

Especially GeoWorks Ensemble was very straight forward at its time, ran much faster than "Windows" on those days' machines, and had GUI functionalities even today's "Windows" lacks, such as detachable menues and an appealing Motif GUI. Sadly, there weren't much additional programs for it, but without wanting to go too far, you could use it even today for everyday simple work (e. g. text processing). Of course, the Web wasn't a topic at this time, so it would be stupid to expect something in this direction.

DESQview/X introduced usable multitasking to DOS, as far as I remember; my DOS era didn't last for very long because I had the chance to quickly turn towards UNIX. Allthough there was DOS/ES on the mainframe... :-)

If you want to have a look at it, see the GUI gallery:

http://toastytech.com/guis/geos12.html

http://toastytech.com/guis/dvx.html

(BTW, I had the german 1.3 version of GWE that looked much better. I still have a 486 laptop running it that I sometimes use to program Motorola mobile radios - because you can't do that with today's PCs.)

Addition: GeoWorks allowed you to use filenames longer than 8.3 without breaking any compatibility.

Edited 2008-11-06 05:24 UTC

I've never used it, but from what I can tell, it lost to Win3x because the latter was much cheaper. Anyways, don't forget DR-DOS 7, which had true multitasking also. Win3x (on my old 486) was never very good at multitasking, but probably because machines of that era had too low RAM (e.g. my 8 MB). DOS' biggest advantage is probably lighter resources than pretty much anything else. Then again, a lot of DOS apps (or apps in general) aren't nearly as efficient as they could be.