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When released, the A600 was an inferior machine to the A500+ - no keypad meant it couldn't use a lot of flight sims or serious software (including DPaint 3 which was bundled with it), and it wasn't until years later that accelerators were available for it, making the cheap hard drive upgrade less useful than it should have been. The PCMCIA card support was a bonus, but I believe it wasn't possible for a card to be readable on both Amiga and PC, and who was going to make games for non-AGA systems if A500/A500+ owners couldn't play them? At least it was supposedly more reliable than the A500 and A500+. By mid-1992 everyone was on top of A500+ compatibility issues, a decent range of hardware was out there - and suddenly companies had another new machine to adjust to, when Commodore knew full well there was another coming six months later? Madness.
If they hadn't wasted development time on trying to invent an unneeded budget version of the A500+, they might have got the intended AAA graphics ready for the A1200 rather than having to release the compromised AGA chipset instead. Or been able to delay it to mid-93, by which time other hardware costs would ahve made for a more powerful spec for the same price.
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